Don't Give Out with Those Lips of Yours
by Neftzer
Summary: NOW COMPLETE. In which is addressed a thing or two about loyalty, unexpected visitors arrive to the Channel Islands, Kommandant Vaiser is discomfited, Geis betrays and is betrayed, and Marion lives to fight another day. #3 of 4.
1. Part One begins  LONDON British SIS HQ

*Exactly _how_ did Robin Hood, Lady Marian (and friends) find their way into WWII Europe, and into their current, ongoing predicament? [Don't worry, Druidic rituals, time travel and flux capacitors are not involved.] You will wish to consult the illuminating note posted prior to "_Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree_", and read that establishing Alternate Timeline/Uberfiction story as well as its sequel "_Don't Go Walkin' Down Lover's Lane_", first, in order to acclimate yourself to number Three in a Series of four:

* * *

**"Don't Give Out with Those Lips of Yours"**

_"I just got word from the guy who heard, from the guy next door to me.  
The girl he met just loves to pet, and it fits you to a 'T'.  
...Don't sit under the apple tree, with anyone else but me...  
Don't go walkin' down lover's lane, with anyone else but me...  
Don't give out with those lips of yours, to anyone else but me,  
Not until you see me, not until you see me marching home."_

**ENGLAND - London, HQ British Secret Intelligence Service - October 1943 -** The film projector, as with many of this department's aging, over-used audio-visual supplies, was not entirely top-drawer, but it did function well enough to suit a one-man audience, at work in a small, almost-cupboard-like space designated for classified filmstrip viewing.

The particular title currently on show had clearly been originally intended for the enrichment of British school children, but much like the machine that showed it, nonetheless served its function.

"_King John, who came to the throne upon the death of his brother, Richard the Lionhearted,_" the filmstrip's authoritative, yet chipper, presenter announced, "_lost Normandy, and all other French possessions, to Philip Augustus of France. At this time, as it was strategically important to secure the ongoing loyalty of the Channel Islands, King John decreed the Islands could continue being governed according to Norman, rather than English, laws. Hence, a separate system of government was formed, with the British Monarch ruling the islands as 'Duke of Normandy', a title and endowment which King George proudly retains yet today._"

Roger Stoker glanced down at the file lying on the desktop in front of him, straining to see the information typed there under the filmstrip's ever-wavering light, like a wayward schoolboy trying to covertly read notes or fold a paper airplane in class.

Rather than a full-on read-through, which he would save for a later time under better lighting, he glanced about here and there among the listed bullet-point statistics.

"**Weather:** _temperate, compared to mainland Britain. Mild damp and cloudy winters_.  
**1941:** _all non-native islanders and all officers of The Great War deported to mainland Germany in reprisal for Germans made to leave Iran; at the ratio of 10 islanders for every Iran-based German deported_.  
**Military strength:** _one German for every 2 islanders, total average. Locally, per island, ratio varies wildly. Alderney is without civilian population, now used entirely by Germans for islander or shipped-in prisoners. Herm is without a permanent German presence. Sark's population of 471 islanders has fewer than 100 soldiers in residence_.  
**Main dialects of Norman in use on the islands:** _Auregnais (Alderney), Dgernesiais (Guernsey), Jerriais (Jersey), Sercquiais (Sark)_.  
**Alderney Camps:** _Four in number, inmate population estimated 6,000_.  
**SIS Operations** _for raiding & reconnaissance, chief aim, intelligence gathering - to take German prisoners: Ambassador, Branford, Basalt, Dryad, Huckabuck. In process: Pellinore (Sark). In queue: Hardtack 28 (Jersey), Hardtack 7 (undecided, pre-planning stages)._.  
**British Government's Official policy for the Occupation:** _passive cooperation_.  
**Documented Resistance:** _Jersey 6d note, designed under Occupation force, when folded can be made to display Victory 'V'; King's initials, 'GR' visible on new 3p stamps. Various underground newspapers, dissenting leaflet distribution. Confirm presence of stranded SIS Unit '1192'. Nightwatch - unknown._"

_'Nightwatch - unknown'_ Wait. He thought he had a tape on that. He rummaged about in the standard manila folder he had been given full of maps, sea charts and further intelligence gathered since the Occupation began.

As he rummaged, the color filmstrip droned on, showing a seemingly endless progression of idyllic harbor streets lined with shops quaint or jolly, and beach views; charming local children riding among vividly blooming flowers on horse-drawn carts bound for market day.

Truthfully, he could think of nothing so much when viewing these images as a seaside holiday, a relaxing stop into one of the many cafes on display. Stoker knew Sir Winston was said to be far from pleased with demilitarizing the Islands and letting them negotiate their own surrender to the Jerries, leaving British people at the mercy of Hitler's madness.

Looking at these pictures now, taken and assembled into this lightweight travelogue of a curious corner of the Empire, Stoker found he had trouble not thinking they'd really gone and just given the Jerries a damn-fine place for some R-and-R. Going on four years of it, now. But the end, _hopefully_, in sight.

_Ah, here it was_. A tape marked, '_Nightwatch - signal origination: Guernsey_'. He found the room's reel-to-reel machine and fed the slender tape through to the other reel, engaging the player.

"_God Save the King,_" came out in the voice of an American woman, with an accent he did not immediately recognize. "_Vive la France, and God Bless America. It's just now two o'clock...and welcome, to the Nightwatch._" He slid the appropriate lever over to skip ahead in the programme, past some of the interstitial music. And he hit on it, nestled in her speech just before her recap of BBC news, the coded words that had been heard over the airwaves and recorded onto this tape that had notified them of Unit 1192's re-appearance on the grid after more than six months thought lost to the merciless sea.

He slid the lever again to come to a second airing by the rolling counter, including the same coded words, meticulously repeated in exactly the same way, this time followed by code indicating the unit's base of operations as being the wholly agricultural Island of Sark.

Stoker smiled to himself at the heartening news, letting the music she announced play on without immediately fast-forwarding through it. "_There'll be bluebirds over, the white cliffs of Dover/Tomorrow, just you wait and see./There'll be love and laughter, and peace ever-after/Tomorrow, when the world is free..._"

Shortly after, the tape ran out, the fragile strip of recording flapping about on the opposite reel. He removed the rewound reel back to his envelope, straightened the screening room and gathered his things, giving the room one final sweep to make certain he had all the sensitive information handed to him for the upcoming Operation Pellinore, which he was meant to head, before stepping into the hallway.

Almost immediately he ran his lowered head into someone's chest, which was not unusual, the halls here teeming with people, each at their own version of very important business. "Sorry, I say," he began, pleased that he had managed to hold tightly to his folders and Channel Islands Occupation paraphernalia. It would never do to spill sensitive intelligence about an active operation all over the busy corridor, eyes of passers-by everywhere.

"Stoke, Old Man!" he heard in a rich, humorous voice that could belong to no one but Clem Nighten, fellow SIS'er.

"Clem!" he chuckled. "You rotter!"

"How long've you been ashore?"

"Not very. Long enough to kiss Evelyn and the boys. Then, straight here. How's the lovely Mrs. Nighten? Still the blushing bride?"

Clem laughed, charmed to unexpectedly encounter his brother-in-law, so recently back from the Italian Front. "The former Miss Claire Stoker is as generous and as beautiful as the day we married. But you must recall, Stoke, the wedding was summer of '42. It's been more than a year, now. No longer newlyweds and blushing brides."

"Right," he shook his head lightly. "Certainly, of course." He slapped his hand to the files clutched to his side. "Digesting all of this at the rate they want...makes personal information take a backseat sometimes, don't you find?"

"Ah," mock-sighed Nighten, "the trials of the field operative, Old Man. We desk jockeys never worry. We always have a file on hand to consult. Or an aide on hand to bring us one. No abrupt night-wakings with Jerries trying to interrogate us, dicey border crossings, illicit affairs where you pray you don't talk in your sleep..."

Stoker smirked at Clem's diminution of his own importance here, dubbing himself naught but a desk jockey, when such a statement couldn't be further from the truth. "Ah, but you make it all sound of such romance...How is everyone? Your mother is well?"

Nighten robustly grunted his agreement.

"Your father, also?"

Clem's air of joviality instantly evaporated. "We hear nothing," he said. "Not of Sir Edward, nor of my sister, who had traveled to join him in his convalescence prior to..."

"Sorry! So sorry, Old Chap, spoke before I thought." Had he not been reviewing his files (of which, it seemed, Clem, even at his level of security clearance, was ignorant), if he had not been studying so narrowly for the past two days on the Channel Islands, he felt sure he never would have asked after Lord Nighten.

Despite Roger's apology, Clem went on. "There is only the full recant published in Jerry-circulated propaganda of his monograph. It is all we have to go on."

In the ongoing flurry of activity about them in the corridor, their stopping in place was getting them jostled about quite a bit. Stoker moved them subtly closer to the wall. "But surely," he tried to offer some comfort to his brother-in-law, "you must know that to be Reich-engineered."

Clem shrugged. "By most it is expected to have been so, him being such an important propaganda plum for them-can you think of another in the House of Lords they would rather have had to turn? Can you? But the syntax, the idiom-the whole of the recant, it is so essentially..._him_. _If_ it were Reich-engineered, it was...a masterstroke of imitation." His voice dropped lower, making it hard to hear in the active passageway. "I was allowed a few moments alone with a Jerry we pinched off Les Casquets. One of the seven lightkeepers there, taken last year. When I asked about them, he...he said that he _knew_ of Marion. That she was to marry a Jerry officer. An officer who was already living at our estate, _at Barnsdale_." He took a breath. "I spend nights awake trying to come up with some reason-any reason-that that Jerry might have to lie about such a thing." A moment passed, and Clem raised his head and the volume of his voice. "No, Stoke-don't tell me where you're bound this time. But at least, I will have the pleasure of telling Claire that I have seen her brother, and all is well. It is premature, but it will make a fine early Christmas gift."

Nighten grabbed him in a rough side-hug and with a stout pumping of his hand was gone, only the back of his crisp uniform visible as he expertly navigated the bustling corridor to wherever secret location his own secret meetings and files were being held.

Roger Stoker gripped the Operation Pellinore intel tighter to himself. If he could have only told him where he was bound.

**...TBC...**


	2. USA  Hoboken, NJ

**USA - Hoboken, New Jersey -** Laurence McLellan stutter-stepped his way down the neighborhood sidewalk, the tidy brick two-stories on either side of the well-maintained avenue that separated them distinguished one from another solely by whether or not they had matching second-floor dormers (every other one did).

He was headed to number 832, and he had walked this route often enough to know that if it were after school it would not be long before the neighborhood's children would begin peeking out from nicely-trimmed evergreen hedges and shared backyards to stare and speculate about the Western-Union man's irregular gait, and about a man of his age not being deployed in the war.

'4-F,' he would sometimes hear from them in hushed undertones, knowing in his heart that such a category, such a distinction, was not right, somehow, to be knowledge meant for children, but the war bled over into everything these days, even, it often seemed, the very air one breathed. This crisp October day, the leaves turned and sporadically falling, seemed better meant for roasted peanuts, backyard bonfires and excuses to sit closer to sweethearts, than for the overseas news he felt certain burned within his official Western-Union leather satchel, destined for number 832.

It had been more than a month since he had had cause to deliver there. The two ladies and the girl. The child with whitest hair, like fragile angel hair's spun glass, plaited tightly and efficiently by the older lady, the great-grandmother, and finished off with a topknot bow easily the size of a cabbage.

Little Zara was certainly sweet, even if her wee size in contrast to the enormous hair ribbon often made it seem as though she would capsize under its weight. Not that at age three going-on-four she kept still long enough for such a tumble to occur.

The grandmother, Mrs. Olive Carter, and the great-grandmother received regular wires from his company. Overseas monies from a son, also last name of Carter. Received them quite regularly until only recently. It had still been summer the last time Laurence had had reason to deliver to 832.

He was always invited into the kitchen by the elder lady, Tamara, whose last name was not Carter, and she always insisted he sit a moment for a drink of something she called _compote_. It was a heavily sugared concoction, and though out of politeness he swallowed it down with feigned relish, he often found himself leaving their house after the delivery with his mouth more puckered and his throat more parched than when he went in, far from experiencing the refreshment he pretended at.

Having arrived at 832, the Western-Union courier rang the front door buzzer.

"Good day," the elderly Tamara wished him as she answered the door.

"Good day, Madam," he replied, using the only formal address he knew of, something about her always seeming to require and expect it. "I've a cable for Mrs. Olive Carter."

"Won't you come in?" she asked. "My daughter-in-law is not here at the moment, but you know I am always glad to sign for the wire for her."

"No," he gently corrected her, "it is not a wire of money today. It is a cable. From a military address in London."

"A letter?" A small wrinkle showed at her temple. "That _is_ unusual."

McLellan cast his eyes about behind her for Mrs. Olive Carter.

With an unfamiliar-to-him imperiousness, the elderly lady held out her hand, grandly, as if used to being both in charge and obeyed. "I shall hold this for my daughter-in-law, Mr. McLellan. She will not mind my signing for it."

In response he smiled uneasily. It was not something he was technically supposed to do. This cable was meant for Mrs. Olive Carter, at this address. He was not to leave it with whomever he found at home at this address. He was not to go next door and ask the neighbors to do his job for him. No, all of Western-Union and its grand tradition stood behind him, expecting him to properly execute his duty.

Now, had this cable come from the usual address, and come in the form of a wire of money (as they so often did), he would not have given the matter a second thought. Those wires usually bore the names of both women on them. But _this_ cable, he felt nearly certain, contained rather important information meant specifically for Mrs. Olive Carter. Yet here was the great-grandmother, her hand still extended, expectant, majestic, even. "You will...see that she gets it?"

"Mr. McLellan," the imperiousness of her bearing shifted a little, into one of wounded pride, that he might suspect her of doing anything else with the cable other than delivering it.

Quickly he let go of the cable, laying it in her waiting hand. "Say hi to Zara for me, will you? I'll have her a licorice stick next time I'm by."

The elderly lady smiled. "Zara is napping just now," she said, placidly polite now that she had gotten her way. "She will not even know you have been here."

There was a smile of goodbye, but one that did not engage her eyes, making it more of a dismissal, and then the door shut.

He found himself regretfully wondering as the wood of his right leg beat a tattoo on number 832's concrete porch steps down to the sidewalk if he would, in fact, (as with many of his deliveries, with the war dragging on) ever have reason to return here again.

* * *

Exiled Princess Tamara Lyubov Sergeiovna Komonoff of Imperial Russia waited a moment as the courier McLellan made his way back down the street. It would not do for him to have a change of heart and return to find that she had opened the cable meant for (addressed to) her daughter-in-law, "Mrs. Olive Carter". Tamara snorted. Hysterical, since there was no 'Mr. Carter' for her to be Mrs. of.

She tore into the paper, her blue-veined hands, and arthritic, but still useful, knuckles careful not to rip the contents.

It was as she had suspected. As she had feared: the announcement of Flight Commander Thomas Carter's disappearance in action. It offered no further information, only assured them they would be notified upon any change of his status.

_Alexsei-missing_. She took the paper and immediately put it to her breast. Moved to the stove to take down a match and the cast-iron skillet. Things that until some years ago her graceful hands would never have touched, kept in rooms of her palace or country home she would rarely have entered.

She placed the torn Western-Union envelope addressed to "Mrs. Olive Carter" within the well-used skillet and set it afire, in short order turning the paper into unremarkable ash.

She could just imagine the scene, were her daughter-in-law to be in receipt of such news:

"I will tell the child," Olive would say, her brain heaping with practicality, with the constant belief that her son would only grow, as had her husband, to (in her mind) betray and abandon her.

"_If_ you tell that child," Tamara would say, "our life here is over."

"What can you mean?" Olive would ask.

"For 26 years, Olga Lena," it would incense her daughter-in-law for her mother-in-law to use her real, Church-christened name, "no matter what you think, you and I have been family. _The only family_ one another has. For long I have not spoken as I might. I think now I was wrong. Wrong not to speak up when you took this ridiculous new name, when you stripped your son of his as well. Wrong not to speak when my grandson, when our Alexsei, left to fight the Soviet with the Finns."

Tamara, often called merely 'Mara' now, when not called 'Babushka', would deliver such a lecture without the expected Russian accent to her speech. As a princess of Imperial Russia, she had been tutored from a young age in many languages, and primarily spoken French at Court, and in her life, until the Spring of 1917, and their flight from their homeland.

"_You_," she would tell Olive, "have long believed that I do not like you. That I never have, even from the early days."

"Why would you? I took," (her daughter-in-law would strain to say the once-cherished name), "Igor from you, away from your side."

Tamara would scoff. "In my life, the men I know have longed for two things: women, and war. I did not think I could keep him from you, then, any more than I think we could have kept Alexsei from this war, now. A heart that tends toward passion will find it in the arms of one such vice, if not the other. As women we can only pray that such zealous appetites will not destroy the men we love. The men to whom our hearts belong."

"My son is dead," Olive would say, taking the cable to its, perhaps, logical end.

"Your son is missing. It is _not_ the same thing," and here Tamara would marshal all the authority a woman whose father had carried fourth rank, receiving the personal attention and friendship of two Tsars, might summon, a woman who now settled for being addressed as, 'Ma'am', but who would not forget her Divinely appointed right to be designated, 'your high nobility' when being spoken to. "Olga Elena Petrovna. For years you poisoned your son's heart. It may be only this war will draw the poison from him. He is missing, not lost. Not dead. I will NOT allow you to 'bury' him as you did his father-MY son. Who may yet live. Who is only missing, never lost. And until," Tamara shook with the imagining of her fictional confrontation with Olive, "such a day as Alexsei's body is brought to us, and the child may meet her father in the flesh, you will NOT tell her this news. Or I will take myself, the child, and my money (no, I have not forgotten, as you sometimes seem to have, that it is _my_ international accounts and investments, and MY jewels upon which we live-as you left everything with Igor, hoping he could buy his release), and I will leave you here without word."

Tamara was so overcome by her own eloquence in the invented reality, by her no-holds-barred ultimatum, she found she very much needed to sit. Her hand shook slightly as she pulled out a kitchen chair for herself.

Once seated, with the same hand she again opened today's cable, read the blunt news as it was baldly related within. She took her other hand and pulled a rough, now-brown copy of a handwritten letter from the top of her slip, where she wore it day-in, day-out. It was dated 1939. He had been gone a year, searching for war, for a way to fight a country, a people that no longer wanted him, that had rejected him, exiled him from its lands.

Tamara's mouth moved as she recited from memory what the letter had to say. It had come directly to her, and as such was written in Alexsei's exquisitely-learned Cyrillic script. "_Babushka, do not fear to take the child in. She is yours, as she is surely mine, though I did not know it, and if I had would have done right by it. You must love her for me. I do not think I would know how. I will send more, more monies for the care of her, though I do not know what a child might need. If the day comes that you must tell her about me, tell her of ten-year-old Alexsei, who loved to fish, and dreamed of fantastic adventures in his very own hot air balloon. Give her that boy for a father to love. Not Thomas Carter_."

It was the last personal letter anyone at number 832 had received. Shortly thereafter they had received notice Thomas Carter had been captured by the Soviet Army and was classified a prisoner of war.

Olive had initially despaired, and then come to hope that with Finland's Winter War ended, once released he would return home. Instead he had re-enlisted, with the British Royal Air Force this time. He would fly planes for them, still at war. And so the regular wires of money resumed, but no personal letters. Never a word, only the monies.

His was a very Russian story, Tamara thought, her own given name a combination of 'bitterness' and 'love', her grandson's life certainly a narrative performed in a minor key, but one better served in a novel by Count Tolstoy, than by one having to live it.

She folded the new cable into the cherished letter, and replaced both into her slip's neckline, satisfied Olive would be none-the-wiser. And she went to wake Zara from her nap, the day, the week, the year set to progress as though the cable, its contents unshared, its envelope destroyed, any confrontation over it entirely imaginary, had not arrived at all.

_Missing. Not lost_.

**...TBC...**


	3. Rural Scotland and news from Kirk Leaves

**Rural Scotland -** Louise La Salle took in a rare moment indoors, away from her work and field chores in the WLA, the Women's Land Army, where she helped on a local farm raising food and tending animals to meet the growing British need for provisions among both the military and the general population.

Her hands moved deftly at her needlework, content with the activity of their appointed chore. She smelled the familiar supper-makings coming from the kitchen, finding herself wishing they were close enough to the sea (they were not) to enjoy fresh fish.

When she had left Sark she certainly had never dreamed that being evacuated from there would keep her away from the island as long as it already had, much less that she would be able to so easily find work in Britain, and war work at that. Though, certainly, the biggest surprise of all had been that of Little Stephen, who, unbeknownst to her at the time, had also evacuated Sark with her, a tiny, barely conceived stowaway within her (in-the-past, unreliable) womb.

But here he was playing on the floor at her feet while she saw to the farmer and his wife's mending, a strong, chubby lad of two-and-a-half, with his father's russet-to-ginger hair, a decided Scottish accent already creeping into his ever-growing vocabulary. Sometimes her Norman-accustomed ears actually had to consult the farmer's elderly wife who watched over the child during the day, as to what Little Stephen was trying to say.

Of course, no true need for the 'Little' distinction, his father Stephen being miles upon miles away, entirely ignorant of his toddler son's existence.

Louise thought of what she might give, might trade to be able to send Stephen news. _Two sentences. No, one sentence_. She _had_ written, as was custom, through the Red Cross, prayed for her letters' delivery, but though they had not come back marked undeliverable, as she heard nothing in reply of them she felt certain they had not been received, the community of Sark being of such a caliber that she knew had anything happened to Stephen a neighbor would have accepted her letter and replied to her in his stead. At the least, Dick Giddons would have posted her a Red Cross-couriered reply.

Since Stephen's sight had gone fully-dark they two had never had an occasion for exchanging letters between them. He _could_ write, some small amount. His letters proved clumsier in their formation than when his vision had been good. Even so, they were legible. But since their marriage the La Salles had never experienced separation of any kind that would have caused them to depend upon written correspondence.

No, Louise changed her mind. She would not bargain for the ability to get news _to_ him. She would be selfish. It was news _from_ him that she so desperately craved.

He had to be able to assume that having arrived in Britain she was well and good. She, on the other hand, had no such assurances about his welfare in the wake of Occupation.

Had it not been for the unexpected appearance of Little Stephen she would have spent all her nights in Scotland re-examining her agreeing with Stephen that she must evacuate. As it was, even with Little Stephen she often fought with herself when the lights went out: even if things were bad on Sark, did she not best belong where her heart also did? Did a son not need a father more than the safety and protection strangers might provide him? Might they three not have been safe enough on the farm? On Sark? Keeping their heads down, enduring through this war, but as a family, rather than suffering all this; years of separation and precious time lost over the Jewish ancestry of a grandmother best-remembered (if remembered at all) by a framed needlepoint hanging in the entryway of the La Salle farmhouse? Her beloved house, her and Stephen's house so far away, their home from which she received no news?

She looked down to the sock she was darning. It was the farmer's. She did not want to be at mending another man's clothes. Nor did she want, as she would do after the evening meal, to be knitting sweaters and sundries for strangers, with Scottish wool. She wanted Sarkese wool on her needles and in her purls. She wanted the day's catch on her own kitchen table, and Serquiaise words in Little Stephen's mouth.

Louise caught herself before the momentary bitterness spilled over into her expression. "_Oh, Lord_," she prayed, twisting at the slender golden circlet on her left hand, "_do not let me scorn the blessings of our safety here. But, oh Lord, do, please do, let him send word_."

* * *

**ENGLAND - Kirk Leaves, the Country Estate of Earl Huntingdon -** Wadlow the butler must surely have been nearly apoplectic upon hearing the news. Downstairs, anyway, his shock must have been apparent, whether he chose to register surprise Upstairs or not: The Earl to entertain _two_ women, on _two_ separate occasions within less than a single week of one another? The house had doubtless been thrown into upheaval.

The Earl, after all, did _not_ entertain. Certainly not since the viscount, Master Robin's death. Nor did he generally receive visitors. Were it necessary to make a call he did so, calling in at the house of those with whom he needed to visit.

The staff and manor of Kirk Leaves had simply gotten out of the habit of a social lifestyle. The Earl traveled to London regularly on business, but gone were the trips to France, or other trips to the Continent on business-or pleasure. Gone were the country house parties thrown by the young master, his weekend visitors brought in wishing to hunt or shoot. Gone were the worries of how to plan for possibly unevenly matched numbers of men to ladies, gone were the logistical problems of how to modestly house the single ladies away from the men's bedrooms. And generally gone was the permanent gaiety of the young master when in residence, and the staff's held-breath anticipation of it.

Kirk Leaves was still a well-oiled machine, but an ever-increasing automaton, a house less alive, less lived-in, now more muted, entire wings closed up from lack of use.

Yet the Earl carried on, much, to many observers, as he had before. But, to keener observers (though there were not many), his life had lost something of surprise, of curiosity, of...possibility. He lived as a widower with no children...who was his age plus twenty years more. A man who had come to be defined among the public (possibly, even in his own mind) by the relationships he had lost to death's hand, rather than by the relationships he sought to cultivate among the living.

All-in-all, most anyone would remark, he was on the whole entirely as he had been before his son's reported death. Steadfast. Nothing about Huntingdon had changed; his thoughts and views proved constant, his emotions steady, his personality pleasant and agreeable. It was only that the forces of life, of _joie de vivre_, the possibility of the unexpected...it was only that the seed of the spontaneous-against which he might have railed at the time-had abandoned him, and encountered him, and he it, no longer ever at all.

Nor did he seem to note such as being true.

And so it was as Wadlowe had told the housekeeper; two ladies to two separate teas within a fortnight of one another? A comparative marathon of Society.

* * *

Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, sat in the conservatory as he awaited the lady for the second tea, reflecting on the room about him, built for his wife, but cobbled onto the country home rather gracelessly, conservatories not having been _en vogue_ at the time the manor's original sturdy architecture had been the order of the day. And so it was an uneasy marriage of forms.

Kirk Leaves was a man's house, with the fragile glass and metal fittings, the filigree and hothouse flowers of a conservatory wedded to its bulk awkwardly at best.

As he contemplated the delicate, perfectly appointed table set nearby him, the one that would hold the coming tea service when his guest arrived, he found his mind circling back to the other tea guest he had hosted several days before.

He had not encountered Lady Nighten for nearly two years, their social circles being so vastly different, hers moving like a whirligig, his more like sludge on a waterwheel, and women not being permitted entry at his club, his primary social outlet.

He was never certain if the years had been kind to Lady Nighten, who was neither as old as him, nor as her one-time husband, Sir Edward. Never certain of inherent kindness in the passage of time toward her, or if she, herself, had certain powers, cream, therapies and such, to combat them. Either way she looked better than most females who were staying in London to endure the Blitz.

But then, she had always been a head-turner, from the moment she had first been presented at Court. And how the tongues had wagged when she had accepted Edward's offer of marriage. Even in those days, such an age gap was remarkable.

Her hair was still quite dark, like her daughter's, like her son's. Her face, where wrinkles did show, only in the most tasteful spots and amounts.

As they were seated and she was pouring at his request, she spoke. "I have not been to the country in some time, certainly I have seen little of Kirk Leaves these past years." She smiled across to him. "One forgets what lovely grounds you have here."

He noticed she did not ask to what she might owe the honor of a tea invitation. But of course he knew better than to expect such boorish manners from her. "And where do you stay, in London? I sent my note 'round by way of Clem at the Mayfair house."

"Oh, yes," again she smiled, "I am there. Clem's wife is rarely home. I am ensconced somewhat like...a, hmmm...visitor, staying at Clem's wishes, I suppose. I have my old rooms, of course."

"So very little has changed for you?" of course he meant, 'since the divorce'.

She gave a small shrug, bringing her gaze back to him from where she had been admiring some camellias over his shoulder. "It would appear that as long as I wear only the legal badge of divorce, and do not attempt to court a lover or re-marry-as long as I have but one living husband-no one seems to mind, my own family being equal insofar as nobility, my title my own, and not marriage-derived."

Their tones were civil-cordial, even-he could not have said what caused him to speak next. Perhaps too much time among to-the-point conversations at his club. "And so, after all that, it must gall you to read the circulated recant they claim for Edward's, now."

Her eyes stutter-blinked. Other than that she gave away not an ounce of surprise at his very surprising, even his very leading, inquiry. "Does it gall me? No." She let a small wrinkle creep onto her forehead. "But it does beg the question...is he so determined to be reviled by whatever the prevailing winds are that now, when it does no good to anyone, _now_ he recants?"

Well, he had best have it out. There was no going back now. Surely their decades-old acquaintance could handle the fall-out. "Which he would not do for you?"

She lightly scoffed. The Earl and she had never had occasion to discuss the matter. It was unseemly to air one's private matters, thus. No matter that he had nearly been family, that Edward would have thought, have treated, him so even without a marriage between their children. "At the time, to write, to publish in favor of war, in support of the Jewish race? It was society-suicide. Certainly no one else was willing to stick their neck out. The Duke of Windsor, Mr. Lindbergh-they were all visiting Hitler, not biting their thumbs at him."

"You disagreed with the ideals Sir Edward articulated? The meat of the monograph?"

"Don't," she nearly spat (as nearly as a Lady might spit) out the negative, "be ridiculous."

He took a breath. "No. I perhaps know the matter between the two of you too intimately to pretend otherwise, at least from your husband-that is, Sir Edward's-side. And I find myself rarely 'ridiculous'. Might I ask, this 'society' you wished so desperately to please, to refrain from troubling the waters of-is it still so important to you, yet?"

Her tone became somewhat hardened. "It is all the domain afforded me." Her eyes narrowed only slightly as they held his. "You will recall, Robert, you were present for the votes those years ago, were you not? You will recall that it was all to which a woman might _legally_ aspire."

"And now," he referenced the monograph's recant, "when the words are revoked, it comes so at a time it does you little good, society-wise. When we are called to bang the drum, to buy our war bonds, salvage our rubber, plant our victory gardens, and thumb our nose at Herr Hitler." He looked at her, she looked at him. He felt the topic was past pursuing any further. "Do you hear anything?"

There was a wariness now to her. It was obvious she did now wonder why she had been asked to tea, she no longer troubled to conceal her suspicious curiosity. "Nothing. Silent as the cable severed between the Islands and London." Still, she could find nothing improper or even uncharitable in his questions. Her tone softened. "I think sometimes Clem may know something, have some news from the work he is in, but he shares none of it. Their names are never mentioned around the house, even, as though speaking them might call down their yet un-risen ghosts." She paused, recalling with whom she spoke. "But of course you will know something worse of that, yourself."

"Miranda," the Earl began, "I cannot lie. I would much rather have Sir Edward here for what I am about to say, and, if not, in his stead, Marion, who has always known his mind as well as anyone, if not better, I should think. As I cannot have either, I come to you. I am in an awkward position these last years, and I find I must make a decision about the whole of my estate. The title, of course, will revert to the Crown to re-dispensate upon my death, but the rest, the houses and monies, are mine to bestow as I please. I thought you might do me the honor of stepping for a moment into Edward's shoes, into his mind, and speaking with me about,-discussing with me as he might-the possible candidates."

She was flattered, but her mind instantly reverted to other possibilities. "Robert," her voice was close to tender, as she spoke to an old friend. "You are not so infirm," she paused before saying the rest, not accustomed to sharing such remarks with a gentleman, "nor yet so physically displeasing as to despair of ever producing another blood heir."

He shook his head. "I will not wed again. Let that avenue be closed for discussion."

There was a pause as Lady Nighten considered his resolve in the matter. "She might have had a son," she said, referring not at all to a wife the present Earl might take. "The women in my family have always been very reliable about producing fine sons." And she found she could not quite get back her voice, unshaken. She widened her eyes in hopes to allow the water pooling there more room to settle and disappear without spilling over onto her cheek.

"Now _that_," he warned her, though she knew better than chasing that melancholy line of thought, "we must neither of us speak on further," and so as a pair they had thrown themselves with some gusto into both the teacakes, and briskly debating the available options (his first cousins, second cousins, his wife's distant family) for settling his fortune and property.

* * *

"My lord," Wadlow announced, and the Earl was popped out of his reverie by the arrival of Lady Sophie Miller, sister of Lord Bonchurch, mother of Mitch, nephew and once heir to Bonchurch.

"Lord Robert," she bustled and beamed, not as much meat to her as one tended to get the impression of. She was so fidgety and full of bustle, seeming to be everywhere at once, when she had departed one always bore the feeling that she had been larger than life-size, grander and somewhat bulkier.

But though she had a weakness for far-too-large hats, it was simply not the case. Lady Sophie was actually quite trim in her never-given-up corset, very little over-plumpness about her.

They had barely gotten through the expected pleasantries when she surged forward with the reason for their meeting together.

"I brought these," she said, reaching for an artist's portfolio that Wadlow was holding for her, "just so you might see the renderings." She slapped the portfolio shut for a moment, having withdrawn nothing yet. Her eyes grew round. "They are very moving, I must warn you. Myself, I cried over them copiously for several days before I could look at them dry-eyed."

The Earl had not forgotten Lady Sophie's being so terribly incommoded at the funeral, and in the ensuing weeks. "And these are meant as studies for..."

"A statue, I think," she answered, brightly. "Of them together as boys. Tastefully done. Certainly not in the modern style."

"No, I should say," he indulged her with his agreement, as he had in inviting her to tea. He had considerable admiration for Lady Sophie, for all her impractical, unintentionally whimsical ways. "More, you are thinking, along the lines of Nelson's, in Trafalgar?"

A crisp nod of approval. "Just so. And at its base, them grown. Bas-reliefs in bronze. The profiles, I think. Possibly, a locally-penned poem. We might ask the local paper to run a request for entries." Her eyes took on a shine with a new idea. "We could advertise in the _Times_!"

Here, the Earl saw that he would have to put a stopper on her fun, obviously set to spiral further out-of-control. "Might I ask, Lady Sophie, whether it might be best to, perhaps, take the sculpture (not in the modern style), and the very elegant bronze plaques, and..._convert them_, if you will, into simply and respectfully listing the names, and perhaps the towns of _all the six_?" He saw her face about to fall. "'Twould be less grand a memorial, certainly, but 'twould better serve the posterity you are so admirably desirous of commemorating Mitch to, would it not? To list him and his fellows? Heroes all, I am told."

She looked uncertain. "Well, I am sure they were, to a man, my lord. But one of them I am told was from Leeds. Some dreadful place called Quarry Hill..._Leeds_! Another was a Scottish miner. Ought we list such dubious origins next to our own, beloved sons?"

Robert, Lord Huntingdon, who had belly-laughed infrequently when his son was alive, and little if ever since his death, found he could not help but chuckle.

* * *

**Channel Island of Alderney - Treeton Camp -** Mitch Bonchurch, rightful heir to his maternal uncle's estate and title (though his third cousin at the present moment took such to be his own, now inherited, dominion) would have scoffed not a moment at any Leeds-man or former mineworker who might appear to affect his rescue from his present situation.

Although, actually, his present situation was far from understood, even by himself. He had been taken into custody by Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer this morning at the Sark harbour of Creux, but nearly, it seemed in retrospection, as an afterthought by the German.

Along with Lady Marion he had been set on a boat bound for Alderney. (Her somewhat more comfortably so, on a stretcher.) Less than an hour later they had arrived on the island, and the Lieutenant had not even lingered to see him placed in a cell, much less to question him.

With considerable agitation he paced the small area of the holding cell he had been consigned to, its location near the front of the camp; wondering, wishing, fearing, what might come next.

**...TBC...**


	4. Island of Jersey  Cabaret Freesia

**Channel Island of Jersey - _Cabaret Freesia -_** It had been a private party, much as it was of any night, of any hour, anymore. German officers only. _Certain_ select German officers only, when OberAdmiral Jan Prinzer was ashore. As the highest-ranking German official sporadically _en residence_ where the Channel Islands were concerned, anything growing, living, breathing or built on the Islands was automatically at his command. And so it was that on his favorite island, his favorite cabaret also housed his favorite girls, his favorite china, stewed his favorite hasenpfeffer, and served his favorite officers and favorite wines.

Small lamps discreetly lit individual tables, and much effort had gone in the past years into making the space appear to have more in common with fashionable Berlin than the rather more pedestrian St. Helier, in which it was located. Pre-war nightlife here had been of a more provincial kind; cafes open late, bare hanging bulbs to light the sidewalks and tables surrounding them, dancing near the water...other, more rural, less sophisticated, pleasures. Of course, now, all gone, with the enforced curfew. It was said some Islanders had taken to going to bed as early as five.

It had been no small matter to receive an invitation to Cabaret Freesia. With unresolved disorder at the Treeton Camp, Alderney's Island Kommandant Vaiser would not have kept faith with the summons of anyone but the OberAdmiral. If only those left in charge, particularly Gisbonnhoffer with the help of Diefortner, could manage things for a few hours until his return, he could seize the opportunity and ensure such a party might prove the further making of him.

_Clever,_ thought Kommandant Vaiser to himself, _that driver of mine, to suggest bringing a sack of Alderney hares with me for the kitchens_. He had not been aware Prinzer's taste for rabbit was so well-known among the ranks that even one as unremarkable as his Islander driver might have caught on. More like something Underlieutenant Diefortner might come up with, really.

Well, the gift of the meat had been more than well-received, and had further greased the already coveted invitation he had won over the other Island Kommandants. After all, did he not sit now at Prinzer's own table, the rest of which was populated entirely by women? _It was nice. It was warm. It was...supple...here among them, not smelly and starved like the free Islander women he encountered of the Guernsey bailiwick._

It would seem during this Occupation if you wanted a woman (one that wouldn't gag you at the sight of her leprous appearance) the onus was on you to supply her with the things she would need as far as grooming. Silk stockings brought from mainland France, certainly. Scent, naturally. Cosmetics, jewelry when you could confiscate it (his position was very advantageous for this). Yet even basic soap and detergent had to be added to the list. And potatoes, some beef every once and again, chocolates and pastry if you wanted her to keep her curves so that you might have something to hang onto of a night other than bones, than the pervasive pallid flesh that had begun to infest the islands in this nearly-fourth year of the Occupation.

Prinzer smiled companionably across from him and bid one of the women to offer Vaiser a smoke. Four _zigaretten_ instantly appeared in front of the Kommandant's face, each held within perfectly manicured and polished nails with fingertips showing not a trace of distasteful callus.

The show was to begin shortly. Things were already being brought out to set the modest cabaret stage, to which they had the best seats.

"You will enjoy this," Prinzer told him, confidently.

Vaiser did not quibble. He was enjoying himself quite well just as he was. But he meant to take the foreshadowing comment of his superior as an order. Yes. He _would_ enjoy this. Whatever it was.

The top bill proved to belong to a man called 'Joss Tyr', his face heavily made-up in sequins and paint, Harlequinesque, giving him an eerie but eye-catching appeal, and an unexpected sparkle under the dark lights of the cabaret.

Before the performance fully hit its stride, Prinzer leaned across the table, rhetorically asking, "he is good, no?"

Vaiser offered the expected effusive compliments, as it was obvious the entertainer was a favorite of the OberAdmiral. "What's his story, then? Not an Islander, doesn't seem."

"No," Prinzer confirmed, shifting a girl on his lap so that he might switch to the seat next to Vaiser. "'Joss Tyr' is only his stage name. He is Werner von Himmel. He was overseeing some Todt workers on the beaches, the placement of mines. Very tiresome duty for an officer, when one idiot worker mis-stepped. The worker? Little more than grit in sand. Von Himmel? He moves too well to hardly show it, but he lost any good fingers on his hands. He was facially scarred and can no longer fire a gun." He tch'ed. "Worthless to the Reich. He recuperated from his injuries here, and asked leave to stay on, which I granted. His act used to consist of illusions, but the wooden prosthetics he wears now under his gloves prevent true sleight-of-hand. Instead, he claims the explosion has gifted him with second sight." Prinzer chuckled. It was unclear whether he believed this assertion. "He is my fool, and performs at my whim. I shall have him read you."

Before Vaiser could protest (not that one protested against an OberAdmiral), but not before he could find himself stricken with some degree of worry-what if the gift were truth? There were plenteous things related to his position, and plenty not, that he _certainly_ did not need to have aired publicly. Instead, he exclaimed, "Charming!" and worked hard to look as though he meant it.

Joss Tyr approached Prinzer's table at the OberAdmiral's subtle beckon. Without asking, he went directly to Vaiser, holding the Kommandant's studied, steady gaze in his own glassy, exaggerated stage expression. The sequins catching the light and throwing it back made it hard to maintain looking at him.

"Number one," Tyr said, dramatically, for all to see, raising his thumb to count on. "By week's end, _you_ will become a father!"

The audience hooted and howled. Several officers shouted their congratulations. Vaiser strained against his own eyes, which wanted to roll at the ridiculous announcement.

"Two," said Tyr, his tone as loud and punctuated as a signal bell being rung in a tower, "The compatriot of your enemy is your enemy. The mate of your enemy is your enemy. And yet," he smirked, continuing on with a jokey tone. "Your enemy has neither."

Vaiser harrumphed to himself. "Then I am singularly lucky," he mumbled under his breath, still smiling at the performance.

"Three," and the audience re-quieted. "The Watchman will rise." Joss Tyr paused for effect. "_And_. The Watchman will rise." His face stretched into a clown-like grin of insensible delight.

Vaiser felt, more than saw, Prinzer react to this foretelling. They had only just put the Nightwatch to rest. Put her down like a rabid dog; hunted and shot. Were _he_ in charge here, this cabaret act, this _fool_, would be headed for Jersey's prison. Clearly the man knew something-or, just as bad, _hoped_ for something. Former German officer or no. Vaiser had seen crippling injuries turn men against the Fatherland before.

Prinzer's fool crowed at the silent-as-a-gasp reaction to his tertiary soothsaying. "And, fourth," he spoke, "and finally, listen well." He shook his head, the sequin reflections twinkling on his face like coins catching the sun in the bottom of a fountain. "I don't like to repeat myself." He spoke slowly. Cassandra could have rendered it no better. "At midnight, on the day the counter-blowing wind does no good, the sun's fire will consume the messenger."

Something in his doom-saying voice rubbed the Kommandant once-and-finally the wrong way. "Piffle," Vaiser scoffed, irritated, looking for the first time to those about him, their expressions. "This man has had too many schnapps."

He felt the unwelcome stiff awkwardness of the man's carved wooden grip on his arm.

"Later, recall," the fool was saying, "I don't like to repeat myself."

And in a hail of applause and shouts of congratulation by Prinzer and his closest officers, an acrid column of smoke appeared, and 'Joss Tyr', this Werner von Himmel that was, was in evidence no more.

* * *

**Channel Island of Sark - Farm of Blind La Salle -** "John, what d'ye reckon?" Richard Royston asked his mate in the farmhouse kitchen, "we've no proper sapper, but with your time in the mines, if we got me some good boom, might we build ourselves a snug little nest among the shafts and the unstruck silver on Little Sark?"

Iain Johnson held his mug at table level, surrounding it with both his large hands, like Royston hoping to use the weak coffee's warmth to unchill his hands from where he'd been digging just beyond the yard. "We'd do better first to find someone who knows something of their layout. Before we set Dale to scrounge you some good boom."

"Go on, now," Royston replied, his voice, as usual, never restrained.

John looked to the door to the hallway and the rest of the house, some part of which held Stephen and Robin. His eyes slanted toward the front parlor, which still held Dick, laid out, a funeral to occur in the late afternoon of the day, before evening chores. He doubted Robin had wandered in there.

He and Royston had not seen their commanding officer since morning, when Mitch had left with Lady Marion. John did not doubt Oxley was trying to resolve the ugly wrestling match within himself from where Lady Marion had somehow manipulated him into agreeing to let Mitch escort her to, and hand her over, at the German Garrison. Which John and Royston had both heartily agreed between themselves was a much better idea. Only, Johnson had no idea how she had pulled it off. Robin had not appeared to them again to offer any clue. Doubtless, he was in a dark mood of high gloom.

Their work of the morning had been a grim one: digging Dick's grave. They had been nearly done when they had agreed to return indoors to a warm drink and trying to regain feeling in their fingers. That had been some twenty minutes ago, as Royston had quickly embarked on the discussion of planning for a new hideout, delaying their return to the growing hole and pile of dirt.

Behind Royston the barnyard door creaked open to reveal Robin, not at all inside. His face, arms, and legs showed the exact nature of his absence. He had been at finishing the digging for them, his spade left out-of-doors.

"You idiot wallydraigle!" John jumped up from where he sat, drawing Oxley to a bench alongside the table, as always when he was irritated, his Scots showing.

"Now, John," Oxley mildly protested, "you know an Oxford man cannot understand you when you start to carry on like some painted-blue Celt."

"Robin," John began to scold him, one of his strong arms seeing to it that Robin sat in place. "_Sir_," his 'r' rolled with the emphasis on the term of respect, "I have told you, as your medic, you canna overextend yourself, or these muscles, if you wish this cut to heal."

Royston had moved to keep a watch at the window, as John beginning his medical ministrations would make it hard for them to scatter were anyone unexpected to appear. "Grave-diggin's hard on the back."

"Yes," agreed Robin, hissing as Johnson found the stitched spot in question, where an unexpected night spent in a barn stall, and over-working an injured muscle spading out a grave had inflamed the wound. He breathed a little heavily at John's probing inspection, but managed to get out, "Marion has little praise for your stitching, you know."

At the window, Royston's eyebrows raised at the notion that Lady Marion had had the chance to examine Oxley's bare back.

"Aye? Well, she'll have to find elsewhere on ye to look, for perfection," Johnson declared, "as I canna take them out yet, though I had hoped to. This inflammation is but next-door to infection. Did ye not know ye were allergic to hay?"

"Oh, Lor'," Robin moaned, priorly clueless as to any allergies. "Don't tell Marion. She'll have naught to do with a man who won't frequent a barn!"

Royston crossed his arms. "And how's the son of a lord to know he's got hay allergy?" Royston asked, curiously. "Not like he's out mowing the fields, is it?"

John looked a grim reply at Royston's turned back. At least Oxley was speaking about Marion without losing his cool, even if he was, perhaps, not on speaking terms _with_ her at present.

"Here comes Wills, and the others," Royston announced.

The noises of the three returned from Ruffords could be heard as they traversed the nearby barnyard.

"What?" John cried, "And did you just now see them? Nice, that, for a sentry."

"Naw," Royston scoffed. "'Tis only Wills. Seemed pointless to interrupt yer physic just to mention Wills had come back."

John scoffed back. "Remind me of that next time you don't wish to interrupt our tea on account of some Jerries hiding in the rain barrel."

Royston made a dismissive noise out of the side of his mouth, but it was not an angry one, nor was Johnson's barb meant to greatly sting, and certainly not to provoke.

Johnson went back to work cleaning, as best he could, the area surrounding Robin's stitches, using what supplies he could find in his precious medic's bag.

So they all were; Royston at the window, Robin shirtless, laid belly-down upon the cleared trestle table at John's request, and John bent over his commanding officer's back, at work, when Wills, Carter and the Gypsy boy Djak entered La Salle's kitchen.

"I had not thought to see you three," Robin's lifted himself up on his elbows, his gaze lingered longer on the flier, "back quite so soon."

Wills gave a grim smile in reply. "Ruffords will not have the boy," he indicated Djak.

"And why not?" John asked, his head nearly colliding with the hanging kerosene lamp as he straightened himself.

"So the airman could not have stayed behind?" Robin found he liked it better if he did not use the man's name.

"Well," Wills reminded him, "without Car-" he saw the look, and like Mitch before him made allowances, "_him_, we cannot be understood by, nor understand, the boy."

"Thought yer orders were to work on that, make him like yer liver, or summat." Royston teased, his smirk showing only in its reflection on the glass.

Wills' speech got quicker as he rose to the defense of himself, though the comments had been made in jest. "Yes, well, Abby won't have him. He takes things what aren't his."

Robin and John looked at the young boy, slight frowns of concern creasing their brows at this new development.

"Such as?" John asked.

"Cutlery; a table knife," Wills began the list, his face a bit red at the length of it. "A small ball of twine, four marbles belonging to Abby's boys...and a silk headscarf."

"Bless me," John cut in, referencing the boy's verging-on threadbare clothing. "Wherever did he put it all?"

From where he stood beside Djak, Carter began to speak. "I should've-"

Robin's eyes slid sharply over to him, and at their eye-contact, he cut himself off.

Wills continued, though he hated to do it. "And he has lice."

Defeated exhales could be heard throughout the room.

"Will we never be rid of it?" Robin asked the question on all their minds.

"I will see to the necessary remedy," came the voice of Stephen La Salle from the hall as he came into his kitchen. "After you all, to a man, have washed down with it (and I will as well), he may stay here. Mr. Carter," he seemed the only one not loathe to say the name in Robin's presence. "Tell the boy he is to hide here on my tenement. Tell him also that we live communally here, what is mine is his. He may take or rearrange whatever to his liking."

Robin protested. "Stephen, we cannot expect you to take on Wills and...the flier," his voice lowered to that of gritted tooth, "_as long as he may be with us_, as well. Three is too many to easily hide day-in and day-out, or explain away."

"True. Three is a houseful," Stephen agreed. "But I find I would rather be crowded than lonely. And challenged rather than sidelined."

Robin did not immediately respond. His first thought was that it was far too much to have Stephen take in the very man that had killed Dick. His second was that, though skin color meant nothing to a blind man, hiding the Gypsy in plain sight would birth its own set of obstacles to overcome.

"Allen, coming in," Royston reported from his window post.

"Oh," answered John, pretending at snotty, "and thank _you_, Mr. Royston, for interrupting us with _that_, as Wills' and the boy's," deliberately he added, "and Carter's fate hangs in the balance."

"Ought he not be well away, off to Alderney and his driving?" asked Wills, looking to the kitchen clock with concern.

"Something is not right," declared Robin, raising himself nimbly off his belly and leaving the make-shift exam table. He grabbed his shirt, the shirt Marion had grasped in her fists as she slept in his arms only some hours ago, pulling it savagely over his head, and stomped out to the barnyard to meet Dale before he had come all the way to the house.

**...TBC...**


	5. Marion to Alderney FB Tea at Claridge's

**Alderney -** Marion could hear men's (soldier's) voices outside the Harbormaster's office, shouting about the Kommandant's driver, wondering where he was, as the Kommandant was shortly to be coming ashore, returned from a brief time spent on Jersey.

She stood behind a brought-in medical screen of gathered white fabric on a metal frame, meant to grant her some privacy while the German's best doctor on the Islands had examined and tended to her. Stitches in her scalp and on her cheek. Cleaning and binding her feet, her wrists. Salve for her mouth. Nothing, of course, could be done for her hair. She found herself thinking about Robin's Sarkese rector, La Salle, hoping that they were able to get him to the doctor on that island to have his ears properly looked after.

His ears, which were Geis' doing. Geis, who had no trouble mixing a brutal search for an escaped prisoner with trying to find someone to officiate at his wedding. _Her_ wedding. _Their_ wedding.

It had proven harder than she had expected, knowing what evil he had sown on Sark, and yet letting him touch her, carry her, even. He had not kissed her. She must truly look bad. She had not located a mirror in the La Salle farmhouse to examine herself in, she had had only Robin's and Mitch's eyes in which to see her reflection. Robin's...no, she must not think along those lines. Mitch's...Mitch, who was heaven-only-knew-where. She came close to stamping her feet in frustration before recalling their injury. Allen Dale had better bloody well show up for work and get to it, and start doing whatever it was he did, and find out where they had Mitch. Even still they were going on about him, about Allen, speculating on his whereabouts, outside.

She heard a hand to the door, and from where she sat obediently behind the screen she knew it was Geis.

His voice was calm, soft, and entirely out of place in this martial setting. "Marion?"

"I am not...decent," she announced to warn him away, lying.

He held his position at the door. "I have spoken to the doctor. He said I may...that I may see you." He stalled for a moment, realizing the inappropriate way that might sound, taken at face value: '_I might see you, when you are not decent_'. He tried again. "That is, that you may see visitors."

She remained seated so that she was not visible over the screen. She made no move to pretend at dressing (she already was), nor did she speak.

"If it is your hair, my darling...You have never...when I saw you being returned by that fisherman..."

She cut into Geis' halting attempt at sharing his emotions with her. "Where have you taken him?"

"Who?" He had not caught up, his mind still mired in how to express himself to her.

"The fisherman. He was just a simple man. He helped me. You're not going to keep him long, are you?"

"Him?" Her interest in the man who affected her rescue was understandable, but he had no use for fishermen in this moment. "Don't think of him. I am sure he will be rewarded for his part in your rescue."

But she persisted. "Will you interrogate him?"

His brow wrinkled and he shook his head to clear it. "What?"

Sounding close to defiant, but also hesitant, she asked, "Will you interrogate me?"

He did not answer her, instead she heard him moving across the floor, his boots and parts of his uniform making noise in the otherwise empty room. He did not have to step around the screen. He was easily tall enough to see over it, and find her there, dressed in some clothing that had been provided (she did not wish to reflect on where it had come from, from whom it had been stolen, or whether its owner was still alive). It did not fit very well, but it proved clean and little-worn.

Her feet could not yet fit in any shoes. A matron (from one of the camps, she assumed) had presented her with a pair of men's slippers, medium-large to accommodate the bandages. She had yet to put them on.

She smelled of medical pasting and alcohol, iodine, and bandages. And when she looked up at him, over the screen, perhaps he could see something in her eyes of the uncertainness she felt in his presence now, following her intimate knowledge of the encounter he had forced at La Salle's farm. Perhaps he could see as her newly wary eyes registered the sound memory that rang in her ears, "_You have not seen him, then, enjoying his work at the camps_."

The look she gave him from where she sat, behind the screen, took his breath away. There was something about it entirely unfamiliar, but deeply stirring, though he could not understand what that something was-that it was unvarnished emotion-that it was truth, with which she so rarely gifted him.

He grabbed the screen, which was on wheels, and sent it rolling into the wall. He did not break eye contact with her. He did not want to lose the moment. He stepped to her and gathered her as gently into his arms as he knew how to do, taking breath only when he felt her, finally, at last, un-tense and accept his strength, his embrace, about her. "I will let no one hurt you further," he promised, his own heart beat-skipping with the pledge. "You are so precious to me, Marion. These past days have been...I would not allow myself to lose hope that I would find you." He smiled bittersweetly, though she was too close to him to see it. "That you would be...well."

She replied more prickily than he had expected, tension re-coalescing about her. "And so I seem so 'well' to you?"

"The doctor said you would heal. He said that, by your own admission, you suffered no..._intimate_ injury while you were captive."

"And on that account, are you more relieved for _me_? Or for yourself?"

"Why...How can..?" He felt speechless in the wake if her righteous antagonism. This was not at all her melting in his arms, letting him care for her, tend to her as he had envisioned (even, anticipated). He paused for a moment to gather himself. "You are angry with me," he concluded. "That I did not, that I could not, protect you. You take this to mean my feelings for you are not genuine. It was _for_ you that I attempted no violence toward the prisoner. It was _for_ you, for fear of his hurting you, that I did not stand in the way of his escape. In taking no action against him I have gravely put myself, and my position here, at risk. This, I did knowingly for _you_." But he read it in her face. He had failed her, and she blamed him for what had come next. "Certainly I could not expect a man who flies under the British flag to treat a citizen of the Crown, a woman, at that, in such a way." He did not withhold his simmering outrage. Were she not still agreeing to stay in his arms he would be pacing the room. "What he has done to you is inexcusable. It is pitiless, the treatment you have been subjected to, you, a _Lady_, a _noble_-the very soul of what he is to defend, to protect! RAF Flight Commander Thomas Carter is lower than a beast. I shall split his guts if ever I see him again."

"You shan't," she said, her voice smaller, less sharp.

"How so?" He had no intention of interrogating Marion, nor letting anyone else. Even so, he needed her story of what had taken place. There were papers to file, reports to dictate, the Kommandant to appease.

She looked as though she were about to bargain with him. "You will release the fisherman back to his family? And his livelihood? Today?"

He crafted patience into his tone where there was none. "Very well, as it pleases you, Marion. He is only in custody because the Kommandant is on a tear with regard to the loss of the RAF pilot, and also a Zigeuner, a Gypsy, laborer has gone missing. Bringing the fisherman back to Alderney is merely a conciliatory measure to placate him. A _political_ move. Your fisherman is a pawn, only. Gladly I will surrender him to your wishes." He must've said the right thing.

"The flier kept me gagged so that I couldn't speak. He took us to a cave, and we stayed there. I was bound. As last night came on, but before the tide filled the cavern, he uncovered an outboard motor boat hidden there, with electric torches to signal a ship. He cut my bindings, leaving me at the mercy of the cave and the tides, and himself braved the Petit Russel to meet up with his fellows, who had come for him in a U-boat-I mean, submarine. I saw him no more, nor his hidden boat."

He looked to her bare hands, the bandages below them at the wrist. "And your ring?"

"Lost," she said, her gaze steady, "I know not where."

"So you were all along in the caves?"

"Yes, until I found the fisherman this morning."

Geis slid his hand into a pocket inside his uniform's coat, producing a brightly colored scarf as a magician might, to charm a child, but with less panache. He extended the gift to her, nodding. "For your hair," he said. "Your wounded pride. I thought you might wish something." He tried to smile encouragingly.

Gingerly, she took it in her fingertips. Her acceptance of it touched him in a way he would have found difficult to articulate. "I must ask, because the Kommandant will expect to know: How _did_ you come to Alderney that day? By what means?"

"A boy, from a family Cook used to buy from on Sark, the Giddons'."

Gisbonnhoffer's back straightened at the name.

"Their son, Dick," her eyes were cast down, as though chastened. "I bribed him to bring me, for your birthday."

"Yes..."

"And then the flier, he, he killed him, and took the boat." There was something almost wondering in her tone.

He had heard the meat of it, then. "Alright," he crooned, wishing her again deeply in his embrace. "That is enough for now."

Marion let herself tap into real emotion of the event, used it to her advantage to sell the entirety of the (partially) fabricated story of her kidnapping. "No," she protested. "His death was _my_ fault, _and_ the young officer's. Had I not so hot-headedly pursued coming to see you...Had I..."

"They would be alive? The pilot, still my prisoner? The Kommandant not at planning how to reprimand me? You must not think this way, Marion. Such thoughts can consume one. And I," he struggled for the best words, "I _treasure_ that you longed to be near me to the point you resorted to bribery."

He looked at her and saw it. For all their engagement, their imminent wedding and future life together, there was yet something more for him to surmount in their courtship: he did not fully have her trust, her confidence. Not after this.

Of course, Marion had always been cool, aloof, supercilious, even. It was her way, and as a noble lady of considerable rank, her right and privilege. It was one of the things that had first drawn him to her. Her deeper personal emotions, like his, were not always easy for her to access. To someone less perceptive than himself it might be difficult to discern them. If she felt she could not trust him fully, if she felt that he had failed her, that he could have in some way prevented her capture and mistreatment, she _would_ strike out at him, masking her insecurity in his abilities as anger.

But she offered no further acting-out comments or near-challenges to him, and he was hopeful the storm had passed, that the rend in the fabric of their _liebesgeschichte_ was on the mend, and her justified indignation at him had been satisfied.

* * *

"Looking for Kommandant's driver, Lieutenant," chirped a random solider as he stuck his head through the door he had opened, unbidden, and into the Harbormaster's office.

"Out, Private," Gisbonnhoffer barked at the man. "He'll be here, directly, I've no doubt. I've only just left him near-enough his billet on Sark."

"_Left_ him?" came the unexpected (but predictably sharp) voice of the Kommandant himself. "And why on _earth_ would you do that Herr Lieutenant? Was it _him_ you appointed to continue the search for the flier? Was it his boat-the boat that he and other essential Islander workers use to journey here each morning-that you commandeered to ferry your girlfriend to a doctor's appointment? Oh, how-d'ye-do Lady Marion? Hard to see you there, wrapped in the arms of my oh-so-busy Lieutenant. Daring new coiffure, I see. Interesting."

Gisbonnhoffer did not snap to attention with _quite_ the level of immediacy the Kommandant had come to expect. Instead he rose slowly, removing what remained of his embrace of Marion, reached for the screen to replace around her for some version of privacy, and pressed several tablets into her palm, indicating a pitcher of water and a glass sitting on a metal tray at a nearby table. "The doctor said to give you these. They will help you sleep, and restore your strength."

"When you are finished, Herr Geis!" the Kommandant acidly prompted.

"The fisherman?" she asked, accepting the tablets and water obediently.

"My gift to you, _Liebe_." Geis rose, going around the screen and walked to the Kommandant.

"I am of a mind to send you personally to retrieve my stranded driver, Gisbonnhoffer."

Geis held his tongue as he held the door for the Kommandant. In opening it, he nearly collided with Underlieutenant Diefortner, who had clearly taken the decking of the wooden steps so quickly he was all but out of breath. "Personal message for the Kommandant!"

"He is here," Geis lorded over the Underlieutenant, relishing the moment, his tone rife with hauteur.

"What is this?" Vaiser questioned with impatience. "Personal message from whom?"

"The Lady Adalgisa, Baroness Bachmeier," Diefortner consulted the message for the full name of the sender.

"Pardon my indecorous curiosity, Sir," Gisbonnhoffer asked, going out on a limb with the question, "but why would the wife of Gruppenfeldmarschall Baron Diederich von Bachmeier be contacting you _personally_?"

"Because, you idiot lovebird," the Kommandant spit out the abuse, "you useless, mindless pig in need of a good rut to clear your head, she is my ex-wife."

"Your ex-wife, Sir? I thought _she_ had taken Holy Orders and joined the Church?"

"Yes, yes," Vaiser waved his hand at the slight inaccuracy of Gisbonnhoffer's memory and information as he bent his head to read the message himself, "that is Delphinia. Number two, as it were. Sister Mary George or something or other, now." He shook his head dismissively at the thought, "_Adalgisa_ had the bad taste to re-marry after the divorce, and in doing so, to climb the ranks. Which is why I will be unable to refuse her request now, as it comes from the _wife_ of my _superior_ officer." He lifted his head back up to them. "It would very much appear that today I am made, most regrettably, a father." Vaiser stomped off the wood landing at the top of the harbormaster's office with gusto, and down three steps, before he paused and cocked his head, as though he were hearing something eerily in the wind. But in a moment the sensation had passed, and he was back to stomping, expecting the sounds of the lieutenant's and underlieutenant's boots to echo his, theirs only slightly behind him, as he made with haste for the docks and the item left now, at this ominous message's arrival, in his sole charge.

* * *

Geis had left, the Kommandant had left. She was alone for the first time in...since...the night before the morning of October fourteenth. Convinced Geis would do as he promised with regard to Mitch (there could be no good reason to detain him further), Marion gave herself leave to think of her father, of Edward at Barnsdale without her. _That_ had not occurred since before the July Occupation nearly four years ago.

**Earliest Spring 1940 - London - Brook Street -** Tea at Claridge's. The Nighten name enough to be given a table, without sending word ahead. No need to take the tube to Bond Street, the Reading Room was near enough the Mayfair house for her to walk, or be driven.

_The first course_: watercress and cucumber sandwiches in a time so unconcerned with rationing the crusts were cut off and thrown into the rubbish bin before they ever appeared at table. Cheese savories to cause the palate to salivate, merely at the word, 'savories'.

_The second course_: scones, baked-fresh, with jam. And, for Clem, Devonshire cream.

_The third_: sweets, when sugar was ridiculously abundant, and for Clem, port.

Outside it lightly rained. The kind of rain that might ruin a hat with a peahen's feather, had she forgotten her umbrella, which the chauffeur, thankfully, had not.

The hat, a lovely camel-colored design that hearkened back to the cloche style, had been utterly saved from ruination. It matched the piping on her blouse (cut in a silhouette helped along by shoulder-pads), and the color of her high-waisted skirt. It was a muted ensemble. But it had been (for her, and the European world) a muted Spring.

She had called the meeting of the two of them, his Vauxhall Cross job keeping him so busy now she seldom saw him to speak to. Out of habit she reached a hand to the back of her knee, hidden well-under the tablecloth, and adjusted the seam on her stockings through the high slit in her narrowly-tailored skirt.

She could see her brother sipping at his port, but could also see a tension in his hand where he held the glass. He wanted to be away, to get back to his job, his desk-whatever it was he was doing for the government these days. "I have been to see Mother," she said, thinking of taking another sweet.

"And?" he asked, returning his glass to the table.

She noted his handsomeness, as she always did. 'Handsome Clem', she had heard so often as a child it was a miracle she had not written a song about it. Ah, well, it was not like she disagreed with the summation. Even today she had watched more than one lady's head turn when he escorted her into the Reading Room. "She will not go."

"Well, you cannot be surprised. It is hardly the proper climate for travel. Despite _your_ recent jet-setting."

She slightly scrunched her nose at him. Her trans-Atlantic trip had hardly been a mere act of daredevilry. "You would just leave him there?" She withdrew the telegram she had received to show him. She recounted its contents as he reviewed it, "_Absent-minded, at times incoherent_."

"He is a grown man, Marion. His recovery can be handled without us present." His handsome eyes showed the slightest level of unhandsome irritation at her pressing of the issue.

No wonder women stared at him...he had to be one of the last men of his age in all London wearing neither a uniform nor a wedding ring. "I have taken the liberty of cabling his doctor in St. Peter Port." She withdrew another paper from her pocketbook and handed it to him. Perhaps he was beginning to feel like he _was_ back in the office, after all. "His physical injury may well be long-term. At the least someone must go and see to it he is brought to London. May I mention that we have yet, to this point, to hear from _him_?"

He scoffed. "You know how he hates to send telegrams. How awkward he is about it unless you, or his social secretary, are there to do it while he dictates content. Doubtless he has written to us in the post and it has simply not been received. And the Barnsdale staff have cabled, doubtless, because _they_ wish an increase in wage, having been engaged now well-beyond the usual five-month holiday term during which we arrange all our comings and goings."

"Honestly, does that sound like Mr. Clun to you? Trumping up father's injury in order to strike for higher wages?"

"Well, no. But there you have it: father has Clun, and Cook, and Eva, and..."

"Eva?" her reaction was one of puzzlement. "Whyever would he have need of Eva? She is a ladies' maid. I doubt she is even working at the house."

"Yes, of course," he acquiesced smoothly, "I only meant to highlight that the Guernsey estate is well-staffed for any need he might have, and his doctor there also sufficiently educated to handle his recovery. C'mon, Tigs," Clem reverted to her childhood nickname, when she had developed a strong identification with Beatrix Potter's hedgehog washerwoman Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. (And had been similarly prickily.) He attempted to cajole her. It was something in the past in which he had shown no small talent. "The trip home is short enough for him. He will be back any day, I am sure."

"I agree." She doggedly seized on his assertion. "It is a short trip there and back. And so I shall go, shortly, there, and check on him myself. If he is so well-situated as you believe, I will make the _short_ trip back."

"No," he said.

"And why not?"

"It is not a good time to be traveling, as I have said, and if you go..." he took a short breath, "you will not return."

Her tone was inquisitive. "Why should I not?"

"Because there is nothing of Robin Goodfellow there." He tried not to pause too long on the name. "I daresay I don't know why you came back from America. (Not to mention the fact you have yet to tell me _how_ you did so.) There were no memories for you there of Robin. You were an ocean away from the war, and your letters seemed to show you were having a pretty good time. And yet here, in London-even in the country-I see it, we all see it, in your eyes; that you look for him everywhere. Guernsey and Barnsdale will not haunt you so. It is just where I would encourage you any other year (any other war, even) to go. But it is no time to be traveling. And I do not wish to have to get myself all the way to Guernsey to see you, Tigs. Stay in Mayfair, or go to the country, here."

She leveled her gaze at him. "Is there anything you can tell me, _specifically_, as to why I should not go?"

He looked defeated. She had called his bluff. "No. There is nothing I can tell you, specifically, as to why you should not go."

"Then," she announced crisply, "I leave tomorrow, three o'clock."

He swore. "You are more intractable than when you sailed with the Mertons. And I cannot, then, see you off. There is a meeting."

"It cannot be cancelled," she asked, without vitriol, "or rescheduled?"

"It cannot. I will have Percival go with you to the docks."

There was a long pause, when it was not apparent if a fight would erupt. If demands would be made, and, by Marion, ignored. She let the tension of the prior conversation roll off her, choosing only to retain the gist of it, and she asked a final, reconciling question, "Will he also kiss me a brotherly goodbye?"

Quick wits and sibling affection had done the trick. At the thought of Clem's button-down valet, Percival, rendering an affectionate buss to Marion's waiting cheek, older brother and younger sister nearly collapsed into undignified giggles.

**...TBC...**

*_liebesgeschichte_ = love story 


	6. Alderney Arrivals

Allen Dale arrived to find the Alderney docks in a fit of chaos, of last second spit-and-polish shine jobs, sweep-the-dirt-under-the-rug-the-lady-of-the-house-is-coming-down-the-corridor activity. He had no way of knowing it was already the second time today these measures had been enacted.

The Kommandant was re-approaching the docks (having landed at them and disembarked from them less than forty-five minutes ago), with Gisbonnhoffer and Diefortner in tow.

Instantly, Allen popped himself behind a very high coil of rope and several stacked wooden crates.

His best hope for the day, he thought, was to make out as though he had been on the island all along, looking for the Kommandant, and narrowly missing meeting up with him. He did not immediately recall that Vaiser had been planning to be away most of the morning, that he had been off to Jersey the late evening prior. No, Allen's mind, quick as it was, agile as it could be in a pinch, was rather more morosely occupied.

_Blimey_, but he had sped to Blind La Salle's farm, fire on his heels. Wings would have been better, but he knew there was nothing angelic in his current mission or message. He had thrown aside every precaution the unit had devised for approaching the farm, every provision they had discussed until blue in the face of what the order of events ought to be to ensure the safety of oneself, approaching, and others, possibly residing for the moment, on the farm. Simply, he ran. Across muddy, uncleared fields, across late-autumnal pastures and grazing lands, vaulting over rock walls and the occasional inner-barnyard fencing of tenements encountered on the way. He ran like a man blind, his path cleared for him, his way made straight by some higher power. He saw nothing, noted nothing. He was not fully conscious, even, of the direction in which he was headed. He could only hear, in each footfall, each intake of breath; "_Colder and louder blew the wind, A gale from the Northeast, The snow fell hissing in the brine, And the billows frothed like yeast...Christ save us all from a death like this...Christ save us all from a death like this..._"

It was as though his rapid-with-exertion heart beat to the metre of the poem. Odd, that, since before Mitch he had not known, not understood, even, that a poem had an internal metre, like the rhythm of a song.

Those long days (or were they nights? He could not see to have said) following the 'Saintly Six' plane crash, his eyesight gone from him due to the fumes carried on the flames, fearing himself lost, forever condemned to blackness. No longer any hope of ever earning his keep, or even, standing beside his fellows; Robin, John, Royston, Wills...Mitch.

The others were injured, too, in varying degrees of critical. Somehow he had come to be placed by Mitch in their ward. Mitch, who had rushed in after Robin to pull him out before the fire erupted. Mitch, who was the least hurt of all until that moment, and then swiftly became the worst hurt.

Mitch, whom they, to a man, thought would go to his eternal reward, but who somehow managed to carry on, and even improve. Mitch, who spoke...to Blind Allen. To him, at him, about him, of anything, everything; unfiltered, uncensored...unbidden.

Mitch. "_Christ save us all from a death like this..._" The lines of the poem came to him in Mitch's voice, Mitch, who had, at Blind Allen's desire, re-told and re-told the _Hesperus_ to him to the point that he could recite it himself.

Mitch, who had maybe not saved his life, but had (while at the same time seriously putting a dent in it) saved his sanity. Saved him from depression. Refused to let him wallow in despair and hopelessness. Mitch, convinced he would see again, even when Allen, his eyes and temples in thick bandages, was not.

He fell hard, coming in to La Salle's barnyard, having hurdled one fence too many. Quickly he picked himself up, tried to get his brain to function, his breath to equalize, so that he could speak. As he was doing this, here came Robin, from within the house.

"It's Mitch," Allen said, when Robin was but three paces away.

"What?" Robin asked.

"It's Mitch!"

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"They've taken him. Gisbonnhoffer, Diefortner-an Underlieutenant. Taken him away to Alderney on the boat...with Marion. _In their custody_."

Robin's face clouded over. "You were there? They did not buy the story?"

Allen shrugged and shook his head simultaneously. "No one seemed particularly concerned about the story. Or interested in he _or_ I, but at the last minute, Gisbonnhoffer snatched him up."

"You could do nothing?"

Allen knew Robin did not mean his words to take him to task, but the question stung as much as his inability to take action had. "Robin, I-" he brought his head up to make eye contact from where he had been hanging it as he spoke.

Robin's hand went to his shoulder. "I know, Allen, I know what he means. To each, and to all of us." His gaze was steady, and surprisingly clear. "Now get yourself cleaned-up inside, and off to work."

"Work?" His mind balked at the order. "But it's Mitch!"

"Yes," Robin's reply was a harsh use of the affirmative. "We have paid too dearly for the last sorry-excuse-for-a-plan I devised." Conviction spilled into his voice. "We must not risk Mitch's cover or ours similarly. The flier," he strained to do it, but got it out, "_Mr. Carter_, says he buried an officer's uniform from his escape near one of the sea caves. Perhaps it may come in useful, it is too early to tell. But we _must_ have you at your post. You are our only link to Alderney, to the camps, and to any knowledge we might gain on where he has been taken, for how long, or how dire his situation might truly be."

The intense dread Allen had been holding back spilled forth out of his mouth like sick. "And for knowing if he breaks."

Robin did not chastise him for his lack of confidence in his fellow. "Everybody breaks, Allen. With our training, he will endure longer than most. And they have no idea, I am sure, whom they've managed to pinch. It is _essential_ that his cover be maintained. It is, right now, all the protection he has." Robin paused, and removed his steadying hand from where it had been at gripping Allen's shoulder. "You were there when he was taken? You were seen speaking together?"

"Yes," Allen feared to confess what he assumed was a fatal slip-up in keeping things covert.

"Good," answered Robin, unexpectedly, nodding his approval. "Then if you encounter him again in your capacity as the Kommandant's driver, it will not seem irregular. You might even pull-off asking a question or two about him...as a neighborly gesture." He inhaled and stood straighter. "Now, Soldier, do as you're ordered: wash up, and get to work."

And so here Allen was, at work, if not in an active capacity, yet.

From the other side of the rope coil and crates he heard the Kommandant gruffly questioning Diefortner, but could not make out the words through the wood and lashings behind which he hid.

* * *

"And how was she brought here?"

"Supply ship, Sir. She has arrived under the care of a Reich Army matron, on loan from the mainland until the girl is safely delivered into your keeping."

Gisbonnhoffer cut in with an interested question. "And what is her name, Herr Kommandant, your daughter?"

"Ah, testing me Gisbonnhoffer?" Vaiser sneered, but with a degree of obvious glee. "I still remember _mine_." Vaiser took a step closer to the ship's gangplank and then seemed to have a change of heart. He spun on his heel and re-made for the direction of the Harbormaster's office. "Have them brought to the office," he commanded, his tone firm and decided. "I shall see them (and sort this) there." He continued on, muttering to himself, "I do not jump like a scalded dog for you, Adalgisa-no matter what your name or title, now. _I_ am in charge here. This is _my_ island. People come to me. _To me_!" He threw a blistering glance to the high coil of rope, spotting someone behind it. "DRIVER!" he shouted, for all to hear. "Fall in line, fall in line. No time for further discussion. Busy day, busy, busy, busy."

Allen Dale did swiftly as he was told, falling in line behind the two lieutenants, and obediently brought up the rear of their tactical retreat to the Harbormaster's office, his pace, as always, more lackadaisical, and less in-step with those in jackboots.

* * *

"You have forgotten about Lady Marion, Sir," Gisbonnhoffer had the misfortune to announce.

"No," Vaiser's answer was quick and clipped. He shared a significant glance with Underlieutenant Diefortner where they all stood just outside the office's main door. "No, I have not. _You_, Lieutenant, will have to bide your time for an introduction to my daughter. Back to Treeton Camp, assemble your report on the flier, on what you say are his current-unknown, but probably landing-in-England-whereabouts. No more kissy face, no more clumsy wooing on the job. She will still be here, doubtless, when you have a break in your workday. But now," he swept his hand as though he were sweeping a broom, "be gone."

Left without an option, other than disobeying a direct order, Geis went.

Vaiser turned to Allen. "Bring the car around. And wait." He turned his back to consult with Diefortner before entering the office.

* * *

Marion had stuffed the tablets Gisbonnhoffer had given her into the toe of the provided slippers. The last thing she should do, when left alone surrounded by so much German information at the Harbormaster's office, was to drug herself into a sleep, no matter how good letting her guard down and doing so might feel.

Regrettably, the office was incredibly tidy, and files were located in locked filing cabinets or similarly locked desk drawers. The bulk of the information laying about or posted on the walls had to do with the geography of the Islands, and the escape of Thomas Carter. On which she was already, thank you very much indeed, an expert.

It would be insensible for her to attempt to ransack the office, picking locks. Three sides of the long, rectangular building's second floor were glass windows, to enable an unobstructed view of the harbor and the work being done there. This also meant that anyone in the office risked being easily sighted, were they up to something untoward, such as ransacking and lock-picking.

Even so, she slowly rolled the medical screen several feet to the left to the smaller credenza (the larger one, she assumed, was used by the Kommandant (or Harbormaster), and might seem more out of place were it to be obscured by a medical screen), deciding what best might be done.

She did not get very far into her search when she spied Geis' name on some papers on the very top. There was a shipboard-transcribed cable, by the date, received recently, and what appeared to be the makings of a much-crossed-out handwritten reply-in Geis' hand. Both were in German.

"_Beloved husband, noble and heroic father, we greet you with love at your birthday, your brave soldier Hans, your sweet princess Lili, and I, who pray hourly for your safety, long for your arms, and still cherish the distinction of being Frau Gisbonnhoffer, Your Greta._"

She read it again, then studied what there was of the handwritten reply. Again, she read it, certain there was something wrong with her verb conjugation.

The handwritten reply, which appeared to have been only half-complete or abandoned did not say one word from what she could see telling this Greta woman that her cable had been received by the _wrong_ Lieutenant Herr Geis Gisbonnhoffer, that there had been some mistake.

She read it again, as though the few words had more information to offer up, some redeeming use of idiom or missing umlaut that would invert their meaning, change the truth spelled out in front of her.

* * *

Allen found the car, tidied it up here and there, as usual, and brought it to the base of the wooden stairs by the Harbormaster's office. He needed to get in contact with Anya at the Treeton Camp, as soon as possible. Of the four camps, it made the most sense that Mitch would have been taken there, as Gisbonnhoffer was some version of its overseer.

While he was considering these matters, and attempting to further strategize information-gathering on the island, he noticed some activity at the waterfront. Two figures emerged from the large supply ship docked for unloading. What he wouldn't give to be set loose in there, in all the goods sent from mainland France for the Germans. That'd prove an early Christmas for everyone if he could manage it.

The two figures, plus two armed guards, were walking this way. Both were, surprisingly, female. The one, in Army uniform, was bulky, big-boned, and easy to identify as a matron (of what, he did not know). The other was a slender girl, perhaps eighteen, surely no more. Her long, dark brown hair was in a severe French braid falling well below her waist, and her clothes, though clearly of good quality, were of a design and color so modest and entirely unremarkable as to seem they were those of a religious Order. Her shoes had no height to their heels, under her woolen cape her blouse was buttoned to the neck. She wore no visible jewelry, and her gathered skirt was cut to a length just a whisper above her ankles. Any curves to her figure she may have possessed were a mystery, occluded from view by the just below waist-length capelet and the full, gathered skirt.

As she passed him, headed with the matron up the steep stairs to the second-story office above, he clicked his tongue lightly and winked at her, with a smile.

Surprisingly (for he had had her pegged for it) she did not color with a blush, but looked at him curiously, up and down, as if trying to ascertain what his position was here, this man with a chauffeur's non-military uniform, leaning on the side of the only automobile in sight-and a sharp-looking one at that.

The matron looked to him as though, had her crossing from France been milder, her duty less exhausting, less unpleasant, she might have reprimanded his impertinence toward her charge. She did not, only glanced to him and turned back toward her ascent.

* * *

Marion re-read the cable. She had the screen back to where it had originally been placed, now, and had the cable and the written reply's beginning in her hands, though she had entirely memorized them minutes ago.

She could say nothing. _Nothing_ of this to Geis today. She would have to swallow what he had tried to cause her to do: to unknowingly consent to enter into unholy, unsacred wedlock-to unwittingly become some perverted version of a 'war wife' (she knew the term as well as 'Jerry-bag')-with a man already married, and father to children by his legal wife. Bigamy. Adultery. Fornication.

There was Mitch to consider. Geis had said he would release him. But, her mind stuttered, could a man who would-her hands shook with the papers that had exposed him-could he be trusted? His 'word', on any account? Certainly, it would seem apparent, not in his pledges or troths to her. (Or, it would seem, to his wife, Greta.)

Her thoughts were cut short. Men were walking up the wooden decking outside the door. She stuffed the cables into the pocket of the dress she wore, unable to take the time to fold them neatly, so that they would lay perfectly flat.

The door opened in. Vaiser and Diefortner were already in discussion, as though they had entirely forgotten she was housed there.

"I don't know, Underlieutenant, _what_ to expect," Vaiser was ruminating. "She was eleven the last time I lay eyes on her. Simply, let us hope she has avoided her mother's tendency at certain weights toward an unflattering jowl."

Diefortner cleared his throat. "Lady Marion, Sir," he reminded him.

"Ah, yes, I see no reason why she may not join us at our little reunion. It's turning out to be quite the social day, isn't it? Pity we haven't any good nibbles on hand here, what? Pity. Come out, come out, Lady Marion," he called, as though they were at hide-and-seek. "I shall administer introductions as I see fit."

* * *

"I do not know why I am here!" The girl (she was nineteen, actually, breathing on twenty) almost stomped her foot in childlike outrage. "This is unjust!"

She stood beside the bulky matron who had escorted her from mainland France, while Vaiser had taken his place behind the largest desk, Diefortner at the smaller credenza, and Marion occupied a sofa off to the side and barely noted the goings-on in front of her at all, so hotly did the stolen papers burn within her pocket, and the circular thoughts they inspired about the plight of Mitch.

"Elerinne," Kommandant Vaiser addressed the girl, pretending at patience with her near-tantrum. "_Sweet_ Child. You will let me do the talking just now. Your mother, Adalgisa, bless her, writes to say you have run away from your school _twice_. That you are intent on marrying a certain...Yanick?"

The girl, Eleri, went into near-hysterics. "I love him. We are meant to be together!"

Vaiser chose a calmer counterpoint to her histrionics. "And what would you say, if asked, is this Yanick's nationality? His ancestry?"

Her chin jutted out in instant defiance. Vaiser winced as her jowl became ever so slightly more pronounced.

Her eyes narrowed. "He is a Jew."

"Ah. And his political affiliation?"

Here, only pride. "He fights for the Resistance."

"May I," Vaiser kept his tone light, unaffected by her overt display of dislike and disrespect for him, for any who chose to oppose her. "Do you suppose, ask for further clarification? As: 'anti-Reich' is not quite specific enough to appease my _ravenous_ curiosity where the blushing flower that is my daughter is concerned? Hmm?"

"He is a Communist."

"Yes." His tone flattened. "A _Jewish_ Communist." Then, barely a mumble. "So your mother has written." He clasped his hands together in a loud clap. "How high you do set your sites! Please be informed: who you marry and when, will not be a decision you make. It will be made by your mother (possibly with the help of your step-father) and at my approval ONLY. We have made many decisions already for you in your life. Shall I list them? The decision your mother and I made to go ahead and bring you into this world instead of aborting you. The decision to place you in Ripley Convent's prestigious French school. The decision to have you remain there once your studies were finished until we found that you might prove of some use to us." He took a ragged inhale of breath for the next bit. "RUNNING AWAY TO MARRY A JEWISH COMMUNIST IS NOT OF ANY USE TO US!" He paused. "Would that I were in a better position here, I just might let you do it! _Let_ them take you to a camp to starve and die with him! You little idiot fool!" He seethed, one eye narrowed as he looked at her, his mouth open, panting through his teeth like a predator.

Her entire demeanor continued to be at odds with the meek attire she wore. "I may as well be in a camp now," she baited him with. "I am guarded at all times by _this_ cretin." Her eyes flashed on the matron in outrage. "I am a prisoner, all the same."

As Vaiser began again to speak, he now held even Marion's attention. Cold seemed to seep into the room, to have gathered about them all when they were not noticing, through poor seals on the windows and cracks in the wood of the main door. Everyone, even the matron, seemed to feel the blossoming chill. His voice was nearer a whisper than a murmur, its pace slow and informative. "Oh, no, my dear. Oh, very no. Do not think you have any idea what life is like inside a camp. I have four, here, at my command. Do not pretend you understand, or speak lightly of the experience of so much as a quarter-hour in such a place. For if you do not toe _my_ line, if you do not please _me_, I may have you escorted beyond the barbwire with but a word. And you will quickly understand what future there is in this world for Jewish Communists...and their seditious wives." He smiled, and Marion herself thought that the exhale through his parted lips was likely, itself, frigid with cold.

Vaiser slapped his hands upon the desk's blotter, breaking the moment's spell. "_Die_fortner, we shall need a billet for Gruppenfeldmarschall Bachmeier's step-daughter. Fill out the ration request form that way, and even though the ungrateful little twit doesn't seem to wish to identify herself with the Fatherland, make it the ration request form for _German_ nationals. Have the supplies readied."

The girl, Eleri, responded with a question containing a good helping of derision. "Have you no house, here?"

The Kommandant only smiled dismissively at her tone. "I live on this island, my little dumpling. You may trust, in the _very_ best house. But this is a military installation. There is no civilian population, nor any provision for such. For all that you are a self-proclaimed Jew-lover, I'll not have you here to tempt my men away from their chores." He bent to the pad from which Marion had ripped the written-on page. "I say, Lady Marion," he asked, as cordially as ever, "spot me that pen, would you?" he indicated the one he wished for her to bring him.

Marion stood and crossed the room with the pen stand and inkwell, both her hands occupied in the task, setting them down where he could reach them.

"Ah!" he sang out, his hand to her hip pocket before she had seen his scheme. "Passing love letters with my Lieutenant, are you?" He unwrinkled the paper, and unfolded the cable. "What's this?" his eyes grew round as he looked up at her, "I am shocked! Appalled! Diefortner," he asked of the just-returned Underlieutenant, "had you any idea of this?"

"Sir?" Diefortner asked, his face curious, but blankly clueless.

"Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer. Had you any idea he was married-with two children? I tell you I am shocked! Simply shocked!" Momentarily he inclined his head to Marion, concern for her well-being all over him. "_La-dy_ Marion, _surely_ you must wish to return home, to, oh, yes, that _is_ unfortunate...to Herr Geis' billet on Guernsey. That lovely large house, with that generously-sized staff. Hmmm. _Yeeees_," he noisily shoved back the chair he was seated in. "I believe I have solved everyone's problems. I shall escort you home, immediately. My driver will come as well. And I will see Elerinne well-settled at Barnsdale _with_ you." It was not a request for an invitation.

He indicated Diefortner, "see to the boat, have it packed with whatever she brought with her of her things. (I shall search them myself when we arrive.) Oversee the loading of the rations and what else you might feel is needed. We leave as soon as may be." He rolled his eyes heavenward. "At some point in this day, surely, I will be able to finally get to work!"

He could not know his driver, a story below, yet unaware that he was to be off to Guernsey by hour's end, was thinking the very same thought.

**...TBC...**

* * *

Author's Note: _If you have not read the reviews page, you may have missed calmingbreez's *excellent* reccommendation of "_The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society_", a novella about the time immediately following WWII, flashing back to Guernsey's Occupation.  
I took her at her word and read it within the last two weeks. It is a charmingly unsarcastic and affecting easy read, and I highly suggest it to anyone with even a moderate interest in these events, or in unjaded, un-ironic contemporary fiction.  
[Unlike my writing, its historical and geographical details have doubtless been meticulously fact-checked by professional fact-checkers.] It is supposedly available in many translations. Although, sad to say, as far as can be ascertained, not in Serquiaise._


	7. Carter's Confession

**Alderney - Treeton Camp -** Gisbonnhoffer was in a particularly foul mood, well beyond what the men under his command had come to understand as his usual, familiar sulkiness. He had not wanted (nor expected, in the wake of recovering Marion from the flier and seeing her battered condition) to be immediately returned to his duty, though he had not fought the order, knowing it was better to be condemned to long hours at the camp, at his job, than reprimanded by the Kommandant, or, worse, to lose his position over occurrences of the last few days easily attributed to his incompetence (even if that blame was debatable).

He had just been setting down to work on the report of the flier's escape when a landser was at his open door, standing somewhat expectantly just outside the doorframe.

"_Ja_?" Geis growled at him.

"Herr Lieutenant, Sir," the young landser all but shook in his boots, "the prisoner is ready for you."

"Prisoner? What pris-" Geis let out with a heavy sigh and a collapse of his shoulders. _The fisherman_. Marion's Sarkese fisherman. His chair screeched back from its place as he pushed it from the desk with his weight still in the seat, his demeanor reverting quickly from frustration to the detachment of all-business. "What have you done to him?" He strode purposefully out of the main office hut, and toward the blockhouse of holding cells, expecting the landser to follow in his wake.

"Only the usual, Sir. Though, Specialist Joseph is with him now, and he's brought in _die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_." The landser slightly cringed at the thought of the dread device.

"And you perpetrated this under whose orders?"

"Um, standard...procedure, Sir. Specialist Joseph knew that you prefer to have prisoners loosened up before you speak to them."

"Yes?" Gisbonnhoffer half-shouted over his shoulder. "Well, this one was not meant for harsh treatment."

The landser could not conceal his surprise at this news. "Well, I, uh, suppose we could clean him up..."

"Don't be ridiculous," Gisbonnhoffer came to an abrupt stop, and spat out, "for us to enact our techniques on a prisoner, even one merely meant to be detained, and then not to even attempt an interrogation, but rather clean him up, shake his hand and send him on his way? We would be a laughing stock to anyone he mentioned his experience to! What's done is done. _I_ shall question him. You may leave _die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_ set up in the room. Specialist Joseph, however, in this instance, is dismissed. Go in and tell him so."

"Sir." The landser quickly did as he was told, opening the door to the small room that had been set up for such activities.

The smell of _die maschine_ wafted toward Geis on the air as the door shut behind the landser. Nothing he had ever encountered quite smelled the same, the tincture in the air a combination of fear, sweat, damp porcelain, and unbridled electricity. Usually, the scent gave him a special charge, a feeling of purpose and near-triumph. It often signaled victory as close at hand.

_Die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_ was not a 'technique' many men withstood for long. The flier had spent more than a fair share of time with it. So much so they had once run low on kerosene, and had to send for more. But then, Flight Commander Thomas Carter had not been just any torturee. He had well-proven that in more ways than simply being able to evade the machine, and his inquisitors.

Specialist Joseph exited the room, a clear look of confusion and disappointment on his face at being sent away. Gisbonnhoffer chose to roll his eyes rather than make eye contact with the underling whose only possible recommendation for himself was that he was a master at hurting others.

Geis pushed open the door into the interrogation chamber. Before him sat, behind a smallish table (just for what might be needed in the use of some of the hand-operated implements for various 'techniques'), the fisherman. He looked to be of his late twenties, early thirties, with hair somewhere between dirty blonde and light ash. His face was bearded, as, at this time of year many Islanders' (especially fishermen's) were. His build was unassuming. Geis noted he sat considerably well in the chair for someone already subjected to the 'loosening up' process.

* * *

Here came the Lieutenant, Geis Gisbonnhoffer, opening the door to the room. Mitch could not tell much about him, his vision was still quite blurry about the edges, and he knew he'd have burst blood vessels in his eyes (and possibly face) come tomorrow morning. Now there, he almost laughed in his head. He and Robin had seen plenty of those, but the acquiring of them had never been painful, only had nursing same the next morning.

"Mr. Miller," the Lieutenant said, queerly offering him a nearly formal address, "my superiors have some questions about your time with the escaped prisoner's hostage." He cleared his throat. "I mention my superiors so that you know it is best to keep this between you and I, at the lowest level possible, so that I will not have to call on anyone...more _skilled_ at asking such questions. Do you understand?"

Mitch nodded, his injured tongue, he thought in working order, but no need to take the chance and find it was not yet ready to move, only to slaver and slur.

He was in an absolute devil of a situation, between Scylla and Charybdis if he had ever been so. Unit 1192's training had never been for long-term undercover work, they had trained for swift in (via parachute) and swift out (plane to England, or boat to surfaced submarine pick-ups). And that, in Occupied Mainland Europe.

The torture training scenarios they had been put through were ones in which they had been taken by the enemy, and known to be military. So; name, rank, serial number. Supposed eventual trip to a designated POW camp, and new mission: escape.

Or (as they were often apprised), unmasking as spies and firing squad, _if_ that nice of a treatment. They owned and wore no uniforms, had no military identifying pins (as Mr. Carter had his RAF wings, his Flight Commander insignia) or ribbons, no papers attesting to such. No version of accurate identification at all, as they were...dead to the Empire. They were the ghosts of the war. The enemy was lucky to catch one, luckier still to be able to keep such a spectre once caught (assuming Jerry knew, even, what he had pinched).

But here, on Alderney, Mitch was a mere fisherman, with an incomplete cover story. After all, he had been meant to be the fisherman for but a handful of hours this morning. No longer. He would have to try, unrehearsed, to smoothly marry his Sark cover to this new wrinkle of owning a fishing boat as best he could, staying true to the impeccably forged identification papers and permits that he had been carrying at the time he was taken.

And it had been damn rotten hard to think and plan for such when these godforsaken Jerries had been sticking him with things and hurting him to distraction.

He _had_ decided it would appear very suspect if a common fisherman with nothing to hide refused to speak, or refused to answer their questions, particularly under such duress. And so he purposed to answer them as normally and consistently as possible in the hopes of maintaining plausibility.

* * *

"You are from Sark?" the Lieutenant asked, his black-gloved hands folded on the tabletop. "Born there?"

"I was born a Guernseyman. I came to Sark to supplement it with essential workers in the raising of crops and livestock for the Reich." He thought referring to Germany as 'the Reich' offered a nice touch of respect.

"A Guernseyman!" Geis seemed positively chuffed. "I did not know this! You have family there?"

"I am a single man, my parents have passed."

"Passed? Passed as what?" The English idiom was lost on Geis. He took it to mean something along the lines of Jews hiding their identity, 'passing' as Gentile.

Mitch attempted to clarify. "They have passed...into Eternity. They are deceased."

"Ah. You have other family?"

And so things went for awhile. They might have been at getting to know one another over tea, had their surroundings been different. And had Gisbonnhoffer offered similar information about himself in turn.

"Might I have a glass of water?"

"Certainly," Gisbonnhoffer consented, shouting through the door to have a pitcher and glass brought.

As he took it to drink, Mitch (in the character of the concerned, Good Samaritan fisherman) speculated aloud, "bet the Lady Marion was glad to get herself one of these. She was looking worse for wear, wasn't she?"

"_The Lady_ Marion?" Geis' until-then open face constricted with immediate interest at Mitch's wholly proper use of Marion's title. "Looking worse for wear? You two are acquainted? You know what Lady Marion usually looks like?"

He scrambled for conversational veracity like a cat seeking traction on ice. "Well, that is, we, erm, being a Guernseyman...one knows of the Nighten family and Barnsdale, surely."

"Does one?" Gisbonnhoffer queried, not entirely convinced. "And what might _you_ tell me of _her_? That _I_ don't know?" For the first time he became aggressively an intimidator, leaning across the table to increase his nearness to Mitch's face. "Let us reminisce. I am her fiance. Surely you are aware of this, Mr. Miller, as you are unmasked as so _intimately_ familiar with her ladyship."

* * *

**Sark - Farm of Blind La Salle -** "Never made a coffin before," Wills Reddy announced as he stood in the front sitting room looking at where they had laid out Dick's body in it. He did not mention that yet turning in his mind was knowledge of the larger islands, the severe shortage of wood there as civilian coal rations were meager, if any at all, and in the coming winter Islanders would soon be back to burning books and furniture and anything to keep warm and cook what food there was, taking in bracken, gorse and seaweed for fuel, no doubt, as the early settlers on Sark had when the small island was found originally to be lacking in trees.

"It is of sturdy, strong work, and respectfully done. A fine box, Wills," Stephen assured him as his questing fingers examined Wills' handiwork.

His ears were less obstructed by John's gauze swathing of the night before, as Abby Rufford had sent one of her young sons to fetch the island's doctor over to have a look. The doctor had done what he might (the gang hidden from sight in the barn at the time), and re-bandaged them, making allowances for Stephen being able to hear.

Moments after completing his ministrations toward his living patient, he set to completing the necessary clerical work to declare Dick dead, and make way for the afternoon funeral to come.

"Would that you could attend, Dr. Battley," Stephen had told him, by way of invitation.

"Would that I could, also. Dick was a good boy, if sometimes not the sharpest of lads." He smiled wistfully for the boy he had known from birth. "But you must keep it a small, supremely quiet gathering, La Salle," he counseled, his voice low but insistent. "_I_ cannot come and risk being punished for taking part, for the Germans might well have me sent away, or detained, and then who would nurse the island in my absence? But I know, also, the island needs _you_, needs this tenement and what it stands for. After what you have told me (and what gossip is circulating the island) of yesterday, you have caught the eye of this Lieutenant, and in your refusal of him you have perhaps foolishly made an enemy where a friend would have proven far more beneficial. He knows you now. You have raised his ire. It is not the wisest of moves to allow illegal meetings on your property just twenty-four hours later."

"It may not be smart," Stephen easily agreed, "But there is wisdom in it, I assure you, as it is the right thing to do."

"And what do you tell the Germans when they come, finally (as you have tweaked their noses one time too many), to ask if you are harboring Jews, escaped prisoners, or stranded RAF pilots?"

"I do not lie, Battley. That is the answer you are looking for."

"And that, La Salle, is where we differ entirely. I will never reconcile my scientific mind fully to your faith-filled one, for all that you can debate science with me as well as any man I know. For when the day comes the Germans ask _me_ about Jews and prisoners and stranded RAF pilots, _I_ will lie. And lie and lie, and I will keep on lying until St. Peter meets with me at the Pearly Gates and settles the question one final time as to which answer to this situation is most-acceptable to our God: mendacity in favor of saving lives, or truth (and faith in Heaven's intervention) at any cost." He closed his doctor's bag at this, his work done. "Now, if you simply leave them alone and packed as I have done for you, I shall return in a day or two-I will give plenty of notice of my approach before reaching the house, on account of your..._dogs_-" (he indicated his understanding that unexpected visitors were complicated to accommodate on the farm at present) "and I shall re-examine them." On went his hat, with a farewell nod. "Good day."

Stephen came out of the memory, and continued his praise of Wills. "Dick's parents will be proud to have him in something more than a simple shroud."

"I, for one," Robin offered from the horsehair armchair, where he stood from sitting, "trust we will find more _hopeful_ work for your craftsman's hands in days to come." His lips stretched in approximation of a grim smile. He had not shared the news of Mitch's uncertain fate with the gang entire, yet. He had hoped to wait for the funeral, for which some few of them, at least, might risk being present. Johnson and Royston had gone ahead to scout among what was left of the mines' entrances on Little Sark, their physical presences rather too memorable for gatherings of any size.

As for the present conundrum of Mitch? What could be done, really, until Allen returned with word, any word? One could not assault Alderney entire, certainly. It was a veritable bastion of Jerry strength and firepower. The population depleted down to only six civilians following the pre-Occupation evacuations. Without a populace, among whom could one hide? Among only the military, which had infused their stronghold with all their impressive might.

Without a specific idea on where to look for Mitch, or where he had been taken and for what, anyone without permission caught on the island would meet a fate likely worse than that which Mitch (thought to be but an inconsequential fisherman) currently endured. It was mere hours since Bonchurch had been taken. The time for last-ditch wild-hair plans was not yet.

For the moment Robin played the game of wait-and-see, though nothing about such a tactic, at present, struck him as sporting.

The noise of a man approaching the entryway to the room prompted the two sighted, and one blind to turn in that direction.

Thomas Carter, hair not yet dry from Stephen's homemade lice-cure, had seemingly wandered down the short stub of a hall in search of who-knew-what, but certainly not the sight that met his eyes.

He had a towel thrown about his shoulders, and had been taking the corner end of it to dry out one of his ears. He had momentarily shucked off his RAF coat, leaving only the white undershirt below. Even so, he had assiduously affixed his wings and other crucial insignia to the ringed collar of the t-shirt, ensuring that he would be properly identified as standard military if he were captured, even in this brief moment, even from this place that seemed to him so far from camps or Nazis of any kind. Yet, even here, his wary, ever-vigilant mind saw to it he could not (unlike the others, perpetually out-of-uniform, unidentified as British SIS, about him) be taken for a spy.

The shirt he wore no longer clung to him, as it had the night he bailed out into the sea. The fit muscles it had once showcased were no longer ridged to impressive effect within it. Instead, it fell slack across his shoulders, looking what seemed like stretched-out across his chest. Weeks of Nazi privation and cruelty had shrunk not only his chest, but his waistline, and his trousers barely hung upon him, their belt taken immediately by his captors, not to be returned lest he fashion himself a weapon of it and its buckle...or a noose.

His face, clean-shaven for the entirety of his adult life, bristled with blonde whiskers longing to grow wild, within an inch of his eyesockets, across the swell of his Adam's apple, and down to his collarbone where it wished to marry with the hair on his chest. He desperately longed to have it gone, to find his face again, and felt thankful for the German's small allotment of food to him in this one thing: had they fed him better, doubtless it would be a far bushier thatch of which he sought to rid himself as soon as a razor could be located.

Had he been offered a razor earlier, he would gladly have used it on his head, removing the need for any lice-killer remedy, curious to see if the sensation of baldness would have been as fascinating and freeing as Babushka had read the Grand Duchesses had once claimed it was following their joint illness from measles in a letter smuggled out from their captivity to family members who had hand-copied its contents and sent it to Babushka.

That thought, so unreal, having so little to do with the present moment, came like an unexpected hiccup, his eyes widening in reaction to it having slipped out from behind the locked-gate of his past, and his turning over of it was what had propelled him to the archway and caused him to forget what he knew was beyond.

His hand froze for a moment with the towel to his ear, his eyes glommed on to the side of the coffin. From where he stood, gorgonized, only just inside the arch, he could not yet see into it.

It surprised no one that Robin, highest ranking officer present, spoke first. His tone was cooler than it had been to the flier previously, but cutting, a dagger's edge painted with poison. "You are not wanted here."

Carter did not retreat, nor did he advance. And, in fact, he averted his eyes from Robin's gaze, as a dog might in an effort to sidestep an apparent challenge. As Oxley was the undisputed ranking officer, it was understood by both rivals that it was Carter's job to take (and never rebel against) whatever was dished out. In another world, another lifetime, one in which American Thomas Carter would need never have been invented, he would have been Prince Komonoff, commander of men, of entire armies. Here, he was ever under another's authority. He had long ago accepted this.

Wills had gotten enough out of Carter the night before of the flier's first brawling encounter with an unintroduced Robin near La Seigneurie to fear what might occur next. With an intake of breath he made to move himself between the two men, separated now by just more than half the length of the modest sitting room. But before he could take a step, the back of Stephen's warm hand was to his chest, in a mild gesture to hold him off.

"Robin, if you will indulge me," the blind rector said in a voice that could not have been mellower, yet no less deliberate, "I think you will find that it is for me, and me alone, to decide who is not wanted in my own home, and where."

In the face of the unexpected assertion of local authority by Stephen, Robin ceded the point. But he did not do so meekly. "Very well," his voice was all challenge. "Let him have his look." He took a threatening step toward Carter, whose eyes remained floorward. "What?" Robin again taunted him, looking seconds away from a headbutt, or intimidating chest bumping. "Don't want it now? Changed your mind, Flyboy?" The emotion visible in Oxley was no longer one of singular rage and anger with the flier; his eyes took on a deeply pained quality, as of one tormented by personal culpability, by guilt. "Look at him!" he half-shouted, his hand grasping Carter's shirt as though he would pull him by force to the open casket. His other arm stretched out into a hand pointed at Dick's body. "He gave all for you! _Know_ his face! Honor him at least in that, that you do not look away."

But Carter's upper body was slack, without the taut, scrapping emotion Robin seemed desirous of bringing out in him. He was without further fight. He did not say that had this been any other house, any other day, he would never have been able to recognize the boatman he shot through the heart, even had his own life depended upon such an identification. Such was the utter lack of attention he had paid to him, the lack of connection that the being in the way of him and that boat-of escape-was a life. Was a _person_. He had been, rather, a target, an obstacle. A removable hindrance.

_Boom_. One shot. One kill. _My boat_.

"He is Dick Giddons," Stephen offered, his tone compassionate where Robin's was accusatory. He spoke on conversationally, as though Robin's outburst had not occurred. "Within the hour his parents, and others who knew him, will be here to celebrate his life, and honor his passing." He turned his face to Oxley, "Robin, would you be so good as to help Wills find the remedy I prepared, so that he may dose himself and the boy? Thank you." He made the appeal sound as inconsequential as any slight favor he had ever requested. He also made it firmly apparent that, for the moment (as his earlier words had illustrated), Blind La Salle was taking charge in his own home, and Robin, and his at-present tumultuous behavior, was no longer welcome inside the archway of his front sitting room.

With a look from Stephen to Carter, and then one back to Dick, which he significantly brought back to Carter, Robin left the room for the rest of the house, Wills following after.

In the wake of their departure, Stephen smelled something in the room's air, not as pungent as the lice-cure's potent ingredients, but far more familiar. It would have been difficult for him to describe to a sighted person. It was a smell of colors, of some way in which he could sense another person's desires, their needs.

Were Louise here to ask him to define it, he would have told her it smelled something, perhaps, of hyssop; it sounded of cracked-with-age desperation, and felt of the texture of a tree branch no longer green enough with life to bend, that had broken cleanly away from its source: the tree.

Therefore, he was not at all astonished when the flier spoke without being in any way further prompted.

"I have committed crimes," Carter declared, his voice low, but easily audible. "Heinous crimes."

Stephen could not see Carter, but when the RAF flier's uneasy eyes flicked over to the former rector's unseeing ones, searching for some signal that he had been heard, that his admission would not be taken lightly, or worse, cause him to be rejected, Stephen spoke to assure him, answering his announcement with a statement of insight. "And so, you do not wish to look back. Because you don't like to see what you've done."

Carter found that it was easy...far easier than he would have imagined, to let his guard fall away in the presence of this other man, this man who could not watch him struggle to contain his emotions, who would not see any tears ready to, or already, falling.

Something in Stephen La Salle, he could not have said what, (his _dooshcha raskaz_, his 'soul story' Babushka would have said) told him, had this man sighted eyes, still, these things would have been easy to risk in front of him.

"I..." Carter began again, uncertain, truly, of where to begin. "...have not looked back-I have not wished to see what I have done, in so long...I, I have not been Confessed in nine, nearly ten, years." He tried for a small scoff there, but it sounded more of a slight sob. "Reddy claims you for a holy man, a minister of some sort?"

Stephen smiled encouragingly at the other man. "I was a rector, now retired. I will willingly hear any you have to say, but you must know that I am of the Methodist faith. You referenced confession as a proper noun." He slowly shook his head. "I am not of a denomination, nor a personal persuasion, that would hear such a Confession as you reference and believe myself empowered to offer an Absolution. Nor would I be willing to pretend at prescribing such."

"No," Carter said, in understanding, his voice gentle as a whisper.

Stephen returned himself to the horsehair chair Robin had vacated, pulling a simpler straight-backed wooden one directly across from it, so that it faced him. Nothing in the air that he could discern between he and Carter had changed with his explanation of not being able to preside over a capital-C Confession. He pulled his pipe out of his shirt pocket and brought its stem close to his mouth. "Will you sit?" he asked. "Perhaps, you would like to start with what has altered, Thomas, with what has set your path so that now you find yourself wishing to account for your actions over this past decade?"

"Please," Carter removed the towel from his shoulders, hanging it across the back of the straight-back chair to dry, and he took a knee next to Stephen. "Can I ask a favor, first?"

"Ask," he encouraged, his expression warm and willing.

"Here," Carter's breath caught with the knowledge of what he was about to break with-such a longstanding practice of enforced forgetting, "within this room, just now, can you call me Alexsei?" He felt his eyes swimming in water and struggled not to blink until it had equalized. "Just for the time we are speaking together like this, as a man of God and...whatever it is I've become?"

Stephen could not see the blonde hair of the man before him, the facial features, but he well-recalled that the boy Djak understood only limited Russian, and that this was the only man present who knew how to speak it to him. Perhaps he should not have, perhaps it was a gesture too familiar, but he nonetheless placed his hand on the flier's head, inadvertently echoing the action of one invoking a holy blessing. "Very well, Alexsei," he encouraged him to go on, "what has changed?" He felt Carter's-Alexsei's-head dip down under the palm of his hand, not in an effort to avoid his touch, but as though under a psychological weight that only Alexsei might see, might feel.

"The night I was shot down...I fly Spitfires. You know them?"

Stephen agreed he did. "The fast little RAF fighter planes. I am told by Mitch they saved much at Dunkirk."

"They seat one man: a pilot. A man who never has to look back. He has no crew," he shook his head. "No responsibility as such. If things go badly, if he errs in judgment, he is answerable only to himself, and he alone will suffer for it. A perfect match, the Spitfire and I."

The kitchen clock chimed the quarter hour. The house seemed empty of any but themselves, Wills and Djak not able to be heard about. Robin, if he was about, off to himself, well out of earshot.

"The night I became the Jerries' prisoner, when they pulled me from the sea, was not a normal mission. For reasons I am not at liberty to share, I was flying a bomber. The kind Eagle Squadron's Spitfires generally escorted. The bomber had a complete crew of ten. Many of them were men I knew. Some I had reason to admire. And when we took ack-ack, and I knew us for lost, though I tried my best first to keep us going and make a rough landing near St. Malo, and then attempted to allow us and our chutes to aim for the dry patch of Burhou, still, more than half the crew perished in the sea before the Jerries arrived. The rest they shot where we stood on the deck of their vessel, the blood in their veins still cold from the sea." His voice had unintentionally taken on a shivering quality, as though he still stood on that deck, drenched, breathless, longing for warmth. "Myself, I had stopped some years ago counting my personal number of kills, but suddenly I was seeing deaths _because_ of me, because of what I had done. Where I had failed. Like Pedersen," he stopped, surprising himself by letting the name slip out. That name from what seemed so long ago, on the Finnish Front.

* * *

They talked on. Rather, he spoke at length for some time, as the blind rector attentively listened.

The kitchen clock struck the half.

"There was a girl-a woman," he said. He could not recall ever having spoken about her before, never in all the bars, locker rooms or war rooms he had ever occupied when such conversations might arise. "In America. Her name was Tasha. From before the war."

"Russian?" Stephen asked, inferring it from the name.

"No," he replied, "her family were third generation, Polish immigrants."

"So it is really like that, there, as they say? Everyone living all together?"

Carter thought for a moment. "Some places," he agreed.

"And this woman, Tasha?"

"She loved me," he said, his eyes nearly taking on a shine, an unseen inner light he had yet to display for longer than even Stephen could have imagined. "I...accepted things from her, certain gifts, certain," his voice nearly broke and he stopped speaking to recompose himself so that he might continue. "I was not honorable in my actions toward her. What she chose to give, I took. But ours was not a reciprocal relationship. I did not love her. I tried-I thought, I hoped beyond hope that her love of me would eventually inspire, give birth to," he rolled his eyes ceiling-ward without explanation over the expression he found himself using, "that I would, in being loved, find myself loving her in return." He was standing behind the empty straight-back chair, his hands fists over the drying towel, knotting it about the chair back's two spindle knobs in a gesture of agitation. "But I think, that is, I have come to believe, I am..._broken_ in that way. That there is something defective in my make-up where love is concerned. Do you believe that is possible? That one may be so?"

La Salle did not immediately answer the question. He let it steep into the air a moment, as he would the leaves for a good tea. "I think that many people who do not know what it is to be loved, find it everywhere, and with many people, and frequently discover all too late that they have settled for a mere shadow of love at its truest. I think that some _other_ people who do not know what it is to be loved find themselves frustrated as time goes past them, as they search and search, wishing to find only that purest, essence of love as a reality, refusing to settle for the artifice the world so often offers in place of the true." He re-pocketed his pipe, never having lit it. "Hearts have their own timetables. When I am one-hundred will I know all there is to know of the many loves possible? No. And yet, do you now know more of love than you did when last you saw Tasha? If you have a better understanding of yourself, Alexsei, then I say, yes." Stephen paused. "And I think, rather, I _know_, that if you are, as you claim, in someway broken in that respect, you may be repaired. You may be healed."

"I think," Carter told him, though he did not share Zara's existence with the rector, nor mention her name, "despite all these years at war, at some point, some tendril of...what I can only call love (as I have said, I know so little of it) crept near my heart. I don't know how, in all this, in such a black and empty spot it could even find sustenance to grow, but somehow, I know it is there." He exhaled through his nose. "And instead of that tendril being choked out by what I've filled that space with..." he could not go on, he could no longer prevent himself from laughing on the wrong side of his face.

Stephen finished it for him. "You find instead that you can less and less abide the darkness."

Again, Carter took a knee at the side of the rector. "For the first time in so long, I feel as though I have been attempting to nourish myself on poison. And for the first time, it is more than I can bear." He used the heel of one hand to scrape away the water of his tears. He looked to Dick Giddons' casket. "Do you not hate me for what I have done? For the killing of your friend? It was done, as I'm sure you know, in cold blood, and without a thought for him, or his soul. The commanding officer here, Oxley, he is right, no doubt, to treat me as he does: with repugnance, without respect."

Stephen tensed in his seat, the clogged-with-tears voice of the man to his side calling out to his heart, with its desire to offer comfort and reassurance wherever possible, but the question was a fresh one, and one that still yet stung. He said a small inner prayer for guidance as he spoke to answer it. "I would be a poor example of a minister were I to choose consciously to hate, and to wish to feed that hate with wicked actions and thoughts. I am grieved," his voice dropped to a low register it seldom used, its tone there, shaky, "that Dick is dead. Grieved, more, that you were the one to end his life. I would that I might have _you_ rescued to safety, and _him_ alive as well. But that is not to be so. To kick against what is injures only the kicker, and changes not a thing." He cleared his throat of its oncoming tears, "Perhaps, having become blind after a mostly-sighted life, I have learned this lesson better than others." He swallowed, regaining his emotional balance. "Perhaps it is only my pride that thinks so." He smiled. "Robin," he took a breath, referencing his friend, "struggles with your being here just as much (if not more) for your violence toward the Lady Marion. Perhaps you might express your contrition to him. (As I am assuming you already have to the lady, herself.) It may do some small good, but you must remember, earthly consequences still exist for God-forgiven actions."

Carter squeezed closed his eyes at the kitchen clock chiming quarter 'til. He felt exhausted beyond further exertion.

"We will, I hope," Stephen stood from his chair, knowing his guests would soon enough arrive for the funeral, "speak again like this, Alexsei. As for Robin, though I have not known Lady Marion and he together, I do have the distinct feeling that being without her at the moment has him set off-balance. Certainly he is feeling the separation most keenly." He chuckled as he said, "When Mitch returns he will inform you all about it, and their life before the war. He is a veritable Homer when it comes to the tales of his fellows! As for you, and your future here (as long as you might stay), it has been discussed and planned. You are to become my cousin, arriving to help in the wake of the loss of Dick's. The islands are crawling with La Salles. No one will be able to keep straight from which branch of which La Salles you are come." Without invitation, he held his left hand out to find Carter's face.

Carter, who had also stood to depart the room in light of the soon-to-arrive mourners, reached hesitantly for the rector's fingers and guided them to his features.

"Yes, good, a nice scruff coming on!" he praised Carter's bristles. "Don't cut it. We will decide later on a robust mustache, I think, and Robin says you're light of hair and brows. True?"

"True enough," Carter agreed.

"I will mix you a dye, then, one Louise's mother, my _belle-mere_, liked best to cover her aging tresses. We shall christen you a dark-haired La Salle before sunrise tomorrow." He half-grinned at this notion. "And then, the hardest part."

"Something dangerous?"

"Yes," La Salle nodded. "Before dawn you must sneak down to the docks and walk the road back here with Wills (who I will send down to the docks so that it will seem he is to fetch you), so that all the island may agree that you arrived the day after Dick's funeral, as you had been sent for, and that you may be known." He stopped for a moment and considered. "Mitch will be best to guide you there. We will speak more about it later today, when he returns."

* * *

**Alderney -** It was quite late in the day when Gisbonnhoffer exited the interrogation chamber. He was determined to make for the Harbormaster's Office and Marion, whom he had left waiting there, before nightfall. He would brook little that got in his way of such.

The sight of Specialist Joseph, as distasteful as always, proved more dismaying than usual, as it appeared the other man had been hanging about, waiting to speak with him.

"Ask 'im," he declared, darkly, and without preamble. "Ask 'im how he got the marks on his torso."

Geis all but forcibly shouldered his way in disgust past the man. "Sorry?"

"Well," the Specialist sneered on, "I weren't gonna to tell you, on account of you sent me away during the good bit, but _ask_ him. When I was at my work I seen marks; scars and stitchings on his chest and back." He raised his unkempt eyebrows significantly. "Marks that don't make any sense for a fisherman's body to wear. Ask him how he come by 'em, that trauma." Here his overt curiosity turned to suspicious and insecure jealousy as he demanded, "Was it someone else's work? Whose? I'd like to meet 'em, I would. Like to take some notes on how they does it."

Gisbonnhoffer had only half-listened to the repellent soldier speak. "_Really_, Joseph," he smirked his reply, speaking at all only to conclude their non-conversation as quickly as possible, and see himself on his way, "I'm not of your ilk, panting to see a man shirtless. But as you have expressed such interest, I warn you: he is fully mine now, to do with as I please. You may keep yourself away from him and your pet, _Die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_. You will be summoned if I find I should need you. Until such time, find a hole, Man, and trouble me no longer with your...appetites." He nearly spat the last word.

**...TBC...**

* * *

*_Die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_ - babelfish German for 'the Mind Pain Machine'

**Author's Note:** _Very close (and repeat) readers [I'm talking to you, Marjatta] will, perhaps, note some slight inconsistencies with Carter's capture story between this recounting and as it is priorly given in "Don't Go Walkin' Down Lover's Lane". They are unintentional (and insignificant to plot), and are merely the pitfalls of writing-as-you-go and researching-better-as-you-go-along. [A Spitfire, you see, has no crew. Earlier it was stated more than once that Carter was flying a Spitfire that night, but it also references his crew. Whoops.]  
This story is a living, breathing entity. In future, when the series of four stories is completed, I will take time out to fully-harmonize the two. As it is, take the capture story given here as gospel on a go-forward basis._

Additionally, all military ranks stated; British, American, German, etc. have been dressed up to sound good, rather than for full accuracy. And yes, I am choosing to use the organizations of MI-6 and the British SIS interchangeably, despite the fact the former was not technically created (at least it claims not to have been) in WWII.

Finally (because once I start writing author's notes I have trouble stopping), I will say that 'Geis' is meant to rhyme with ICE, not geese, and Alexsei is "ALEK-say" as opposed to "uh-LEXI". And that is where I will stop. For now... 


	8. Washhouse  Servant's Stair Surprise

**Guernsey -** The boat trip from Alderney had proven an awkward one, to put it generously. Before putting out to sea, the German Army matron chaperoning Eleri Vaiser had been summarily dismissed to join with her fellow women working the barracks at one of the camps, until a ship might take her back to the mainland and her further orders there.

Without the matron there proved to be no buffer, no translator between the Kommandant and his deeply estranged daughter. And certainly Marion was not feeling up to such a social task at the moment.

The Kommandant, who apparently took quite a shine to being out on the water, more or less ignored both Eleri and Marion, choosing instead to chat intermittently with his chauffeur near the bow, if he spoke at all; Eleri and Marion banished to the stern, Marion closing her eyes as often as possible, wishing for sleep, but the sun reflecting off the waves, like light on crumpled cellophane, made even such a task on the whole, unpleasant.

* * *

**Sark - Farm of Blind La Salle -** Robin had sent Wills and the Gypsy to the detached washhouse with the lice-cure. The outbuilding held what there was of indoor plumbing on the un-mechanized farm; a sink with taps, an all-but antique water closet, and corrugated metal tubs of various sizes used for the washing of clothes-or bodies.

There was a small pot-bellied stove on one end to allow for both the necessary heating of water, kettle by kettle, and also for heating the space to make bathing less frigid.

Carter had taken his treatment in the kitchen, pumping water for himself at the well near the barnyard and heating a single kettle of it on the cast-iron range.

But Robin had prescribed no such similarly lax treatment for Wills and Djak. "See to it the boy gets a thorough dousing, head-to-toe. And if you have been at obeying my orders in keeping closest proximity to him? By all means, yourself as well."

Wills had tried to object and stall for time, "but without Carter how am I to persuade-?"

"Need I remind you again," Robin told him, "you are the _communications_ officer. Go. Communicate. You have forty-five minutes before people begin to arrive and you must get him hidden. Be thorough, but quick." And Oxley had walked away to see to the modest early-afternoon chores nearest the house.

It had not proven difficult for Wills to get the boy to come with him into the washhouse, but he seemed to be finding out that this Gypsy did not care for getting clean.

He had helped Wills stoke up the fire and heat two good four-gallon kettles of water to boiling, to be diluted with cold from the tap in the largest tub which they had, as a team, pulled out into the center of the floor. Beyond that, Djak had not stirred, much less begun to prepare himself for the delousing.

Wills moved to the toilet to relieve himself of excess piss before the coming tub-soak. Knowing he was going to undress shortly anyway, he had kicked off his boots in one corner of the room, and casually let drop his trousers and unders to his ankles while he stood at the edge of the porcelain bowl.

He had not noticed the boy's wary reaction to this.

"Well," he said, knowing Djak could not understand him, but keeping up a friendly chatter anyway, "let's get you sorted."

He kicked off what was left about his ankles, not yet removing his shirt, and, bare-bottomed, moved toward where the boy stood in the opposite corner of the room.

Djak had yet to remove a single item of clothing. Not that the boy had many. And what he was wearing (if it had once been of a color, any color, it could not be guessed at now, resembling nothing so much as 'dun') was so worn with constant use it was close to shredding, thin as tissue paper in some spots.

One did not change clothes in the camps; one was lucky, in point of fact, to have a complete set. At Treeton, socks (in any condition) were as much currency as gold, any underclothes purely mythological, and actual belts or braces long ago left behind with fond memories of the halcyon past.

"Shirt off," Wills said, using his first finger to gesture to the garment needing removed. "Robin has spoken. It'll be the full treatment for us."

The Gypsy's eyes flashed a fear of recognition at the name of Robin, which he had already learned stood for Oxley, the perceived '_rom baro_' of the unit's clan.

Although the boy recognized the name, Wills had never seen him react to it with such alarm. It was only a sort-of bath, after all.

"We haven't much time," Wills announced, again fighting frustration that Carter was not present to smooth the situation. "Here, let me help you." He reached for the hem of Djak's tattered shirt, and bedlam erupted.

The boy turned into seven of himself, each wilder than the next, each impossible to get a hold on: arms, legs, all wild as windmills, struggling to get free and avoid (what Wills assumed was) the coming lice-down and bath.

Wills' hand still had the shirt's hem. He increased his grip on it, trying to keep himself from being injured, and at the same time trying to prevent himself from hurting the boy.

In an instant, the shirt tore, or, more aptly, disintegrated in Wills' strong hands. His mind registered that he had done it: he had managed to remove the first impediment to the bath. He wondered if he might get away with simply throwing the boy, still in his trousers, into the tub, going about it that way.

Immediately his brain stepped on that thought, informing him something quite cold and sharp was now very alarmingly laid across his upper thigh. Very near..._Oh shite, it was a knife_. Not one of Abby Rufford's dull-bladed table knives. No, a large, fully-functional knife meant for butchery.

Wills stopped breathing entirely. Very, very slowly he raised his eyes to meet Djak's. In their gradual raising, they tracked the boy's dusky skin tone up Djak's now-bared abdomen, over his navel and up toward the skirt of his ribs. And there was Wills' answer: two perfectly vehement answers to what was going on.

He saw Djak-he saw _her_-look to the nearby kettles on the boil, Wills' mind filling in the notion clearly forming in hers: if the knife did not make her point, surely the scalding water would.

His hands (with which had so determinedly been trying to get a grip on her), he raised slowly to show that they were no longer any threat. (Truly, he cared not if she were lice-infested for the rest of her days if only he could be allowed to move his vitals clear of her knife's threat.) Again, slowly, he backed away, over toward the water closet, and his cast-off trousers.

Thanks be to goodness, she let him.

He could not take his eyes off her, and not only because he felt it smart to keep them trained on the dangerous knife she brandished.

She stood like a wild thing, an innately noble thing, not a visible ounce of modesty or embarrassment about her in her denuded state.

It had been well over a year since he had seen a topless woman in the flesh. Certainly the sight of her youthful allotment would more than suffice for another twelve-month. Already, he knew, the image of her there was burned forever in his brain. For a flash he was quite thankful of the scare with the knife. It would certainly help him keep his cool until he could get his trousers back in place, not frightening her any further.

He bent over and grabbed for them from where they lay on the floor, his hand scrabbling for a paper he had folded into one of their pockets. It was the beginning of his syllabary of Romany words, transliterated into his approximation of English. He spoke a poorly rendered, '_I do not know_', trying to explain that he had in no way meant for him-_her_ to think he was about to attack her, pantsless, aggressively pulling off her clothing; to explain that rape had not been anywhere in his mind.

She stood immobile, her stance constant from the moment he had backed away from her, like a warrior practicing at stillness, the knife raised in one hand, yet on the defensive (if stepped down from the attack). Her shoulders were squared, proud, uncowed by the bareness of her upper body, this wrinkle in their encounter seeming to discomfit her far less than it had him.

There was no blush, no shame about her. As he hastily pulled on his trousers he thought of a marble he had seen once in a gallery, of what was supposed to be the rendering of an Amazon. She had not the height of that woman in marble, nor the plump (rather than logically muscular) build of the statue, and Djak's breasts were a well-balanced set, not the single one that imaginary archeress had worn. But there was something in her dark eyes (so dark it usually seemed impossible that they might be able to register any change in emotion), the fierceness, the potential ferocity that she shared with that artist-conjured Amazon.

'_Her_', he said in some approximation of Romany, consulting his crib sheet, falling back on using the feminine possessive pronoun because he could not, with his scribbles, locate the sound meaning '_girl_' quickly enough.

'_She_', replied Djak in exacting Romany, claiming the gender she owned. Agreeing, for the moment, to believe Wills Reddy, that he had not intended harm for her, though there was no way (even with this misunderstanding nearly straightened out), not even at the demand of the _rom baro_, that she would willingly bathe herself in front of a man.

She had no idea how to ask him for another shirt, a covering of some kind. As much as she was glad the flier, Carter, was not here, had he been, things would certainly have run more smoothly.

Wills had his trousers back in place. She had lowered the knife some. He held up his hand as if to tell her to wait, and removed his shirt over his head. Up came the knife at his further undressing, but he extended the garment toward her. Slowly she reached out her free hand and snatched it from him, not putting it on, simply holding it.

He made motions with the crockery bowl of remedy Stephen had mixed up, showing that she should apply it to herself all-over, and then exited the door, never turning his back on her.

Once outside, Wills, despite the cool of being shirtless out in the October air, slumped down the slatted wooden door, heard it being latched from the inside and marveled at what could possibly go wrong next.

Just steps outside of the main barn, Robin stopped short upon sighting him. "Lost yer shirt, Lavender Boy?" he joked, aping Royston's broad speech.

And so, perhaps there was something not so awfully awkward in this moment, if Wills' discomfort, his chilly chest and his embarrassment in the wake of Djak's newly-discovered secret could somehow yet bring a smile to Oxley's of-late grim set of mouth.

* * *

Robin walked back in through the wide barn doors, one propped open to make chores easier, to the empty-for-now stables he had been spreading a fresh layer of straw down in, one never finding oneself with nothing to do on a farm (so he was learning). He needed busy work for the moment, of any possible kind, sod John and his worry of allergies and stitchings.

_No, he didn't mean that_. What he meant was sod Mitch. Sod Marion. Sod the islands, sod the war. Just, buggering sod it all. Why did Bonchurch have to go and agree to return Marion? Why did Marion have to lobby for him to do it?

If she had not, he, Robin, would have been on Alderney right now. He would be accepting whatever punishments they chose to throw Mitch's way-all rightfully his. It was him responsible for the enormous brodie of a non-plan that had gotten Marion traumatized and injured. Him who sent Dick to his death. Him who just kept agreeing to (if not himself devising) continual missteps in the still-not-complete attempt to re-establish post-operation equilibrium.

Marion had asked him to step outside this morning, to speak in private after breakfast. Naturally he had assumed she wanted a moment alone, where they could revisit their nostalgic intimacy of the night before.

Once they were to the side of the barn by the chicken coop, concealed from the house, she made it abundantly clear (with an almost managerial level of dispatch) that she had something quite other in mind.

_Send Mitch to hand her over? To deliver her again into the arms of the devil? Why should he?_

"Why do you fight this so hard?" she had asked, pent-up frustration evident in her voice. She pulled at the borrowed jumper of Robin's she wore, trying to claim more warmth from it. "This is not a medieval tournament, where Mitch has won the joust, and so won the fair lady to boot."

"No," he had stormed back at her (chagrined now to recall his loutish behavior), "'twould not be so easily done, for I declare, Marion, you are the hardest woman to win in all England!"

"You have forgotten, then," she had bit back, as he tried not to notice her injured wrist when she used her fingers to try and tamp her hair behind her ear from where it kept catching in the wind of the day, "we are not _in_ England. Not any longer. The rules have changed."

"And so you mean to go through with it."

"What?" she had asked, reasonably, "Going with Mitch to the garrison? Yes."

"Wedding Gisbonnhoffer."

They would have been standing in utter silence had the wind off the sea not picked up, carrying away the barnyard noises all about them, replacing them with a racket of its own making.

"This is not England, Robin," she had reiterated. "Not anymore. You are no longer the son of an earl, no longer with such privileges. And my status as a lady, daughter of Lord Nighten? No longer a protection, a guarantee of deferential behavior. Rather, a target." Her eyebrows flicked up. "Gentility is now but a cruel joke, here. Any rights I have are those the Reich chooses to give to me. Or, as easily, chooses to take. What options have I? He will have me if I consent or if I do not. If I do not consent, I _will_ be his by force." She had seen him look away for a moment at her baldly outlining the truth of it for him. "By force, and not even, then, in wedlock. Would that suit you better?"

"I will kill him," he had said.

She had half-rolled her eyes, not counting his threat as a valid line of reasoning. "You are not a woman," she had told him. "You do not understand."

He had scoffed, refusing to believe gender played into the issue. "What is there possibly to understand? That he will hurt you? That you speak of-God help me, Marion-_rape_ to me as you stand here like it is the order of the day? Batting not so much as an eyelash as you outline the bleakness of your future? Chosen or not?"

"Things are not as they were at home, Robin. I say it, but you do not hear it. Were there twenty Islander men to attempt to protect me from him, even armed, they could not. He has an entire occupying force on his side. I have caught his eye, and he has chosen me. I cannot simply run away somewhere he will not find me, I cannot change my identity, I cannot hide in the woods, nor leave the islands at will. There is my father. And there is the impossibility of resisting. My wedding Geis is inevitable. The sooner you reconcile yourself to it, the sooner we can, I think, stop fighting unwinnable fights."

"I will kill him, then," he had said again, his blood on the boil, meaning it no less than he had the first time.

She half-laughed, choosing to see foolhardiness in his vow. "Is my happiness in life, my safety so important that you would value it over the lives of twenty-five innocent Islanders, then?"

He had not responded.

She drove forward, testing him. "Over the life of a _single_, innocent person?"

"YES!" he had said, his word harsh, agreeing before he knew he would.

"It is that important to you, that I be well, and happy?" a frown had creased her brow, painted it with confusion as well as disapproval at the immoral choice his gut had made for him. "And is _yours_? _Your_ safety and wellness, is it tantamount to the life of an innocent? Is it worth that?"

"Never!" he had shouted, his voice instantly carried off on the still-churning wind.

They had both stood in the wake of his declaration for some moments, neither saying another word.

The wind had begun to settle some, and she had looked back toward the farmhouse. "Married to Gisbonnhoffer or not, I will carry on as I do now. I shall look after father, assist Islanders less-fortunate whenever possible, and broadcast the Nightwatch. And for now, I will travel to the German garrison with Mitch as my escort." She saw he was about to protest. "If you cannot stop it," she told him, referencing her coming marriage, "then do not speak of it. If you care about me, then do the right thing: let me go. With Mitch, now, and later," she had refused to let herself be shaken by referring to it, "with Geis. You have seen, with Stephen, a small corner of what he is capable of when he does not get that which he wants." Her eyes had wandered away from his during some portion of this speech, only at the end again seeking his out. She pulled at the jumper of his she was wearing, getting it over her head and off. She held it out for him to take.

He did not move to take it. "_I_ live in the woods," he had told her, trying to illustrate that he thought it was possible, that eluding her version of the inevitable could be done. "_I_ have changed my identity."

He had been able to tell from her face that she did not wish to speak on the issue further, but still she told him, "You are a ghost here. They do not even know for whom or for what they look. A missing box of ammunition here, a platoon short on rations there, a lost code book, a landser whose long leave resulted in the spilling of important secrets to Allen or one of the others that you later add to your growing cache of intelligence gathered while on the islands...They could pass you twenty times a day and not know you for their enemy."

"They're probably so dumb they could pass John twenty times a day and not recognize him from one day to the next," he attempted irony.

She had continued, "the 'forest' in which you live, Robin, it is a place outside society, outside, even, the Occupation. Were I to try and join you there, it would only expose you to him," (she did not repeat Gisbonnhoffer's name), "and then not only would I be in the same quandary I am now, he would have you as well." Her voice slowed. "And then _I_ would kill him," her eyes became deeper than forty wells, "and willingly taint my soul with the lives of those twenty-five others."

His mind could think of no way to respond to this, other than grabbing her and holding her tightly to him. He forbore. "I wish the sun had never risen on last night," he said, recalling their charmed time together among the animals.

"Yes," she had said, but not entirely as though she was agreeing with him, only acknowledging his statement. "Perhaps it has not done so over England. Perhaps England is still free from such a dawn as comes here. To us."

Marion had not told him (she never did) that she had no confidence that she would live to see the day she would marry Gisbonnhoffer, no confidence that if she did live to that she would survive to see the war ended with England the victor. Or, if she did, that the Islands (and the people thereon) might not, in the end, be ceded to Germany, her nightmare never ending, rolling on and on until her body gave up (as on some days, she thought, her spirit already had).

Robin had not told her that the thing that frightened him so much was that what she claimed could not be avoided, the joining of herself to this Nazi Lieutenant by marriage vow, once entered into, could never truly be undone.

"Visit the Nightwatch, when you may," she had told him, her last words before she was gone.

* * *

Hours later, now, news of Mitch's detention still swimming in his thoughts, Robin brought his foot within an inch of an empty milking pail, cocked back his lower leg and gave it a sound kick of which any good footballer might approve. When he found it again, where it had launched, over by the sacks of feed, he was sorry to see it had not retained so much as a dent to commemorate his fit of (he thought, very justifiable) temper.

* * *

**Guernsey - Barnsdale Estate -** Marion was rushing down the servants' stair into the kitchens, hoping, quite wildly, in fact (she had almost forgotten her poor feet) that she might catch Allen before he left Barnsdale to drive Vaiser back to the harbor and caught the boat with his employer back to Alderney. She tried to keep her clattering on the steps to a minimum, but it was a tight space; undecorated wooden walls, well-traveled wooden steps whose wood shone with the marks of frequent use, and it had a decided tendency to echo.

It would not do to meet with a servant on the stairs, though she was prepared with a healthy list of excuses for her being caught here to share with them. Still, she would rather not have to do so, as it would delay her finding of Allen, her only channel to Robin and Co. at the moment.

She had stopped on the main floor landing, just by the door beyond which lay the official 'upstairs' portion of the house. She paused to check for other traffic on the stairs as she leaned against the at-present empty buffet countertop built-in here. Built to accommodate anything from food to tea to linens that needed a momentary place to sit on their way into the house proper. The door was set back in a deep, nearly closet-like cubby the width of the generous doorframe, and a good two-and-a-half foot deep. Even this unimportant (only seen by servants) niche of the house had beautiful carvings in the wood paneling, classical medallions honeycombing the short passageway from stair landing to door.

Her fingertips ran nervously over the indentations of them as she held her breath to listen.

She saw him before she heard any sound of him whatsoever, her heart startled at the sight of him, so instantly there, with no noise to indicate his coming. _Allen_. "Good," she said, her voice slightly breathless with the surprise of him.

He raised one leg up to the modest landing and toward where she stood, his footfall soundless in its impact. The light in the stair was low, as it was late in the day, but not yet late enough to engage the blackout curtains and lights. She could not read his expression, or the cast of his eyes. She did not know she needed to.

"Marion," his speech was rushed, she thought from rapid ascent of the stairs. "It's good..." he said, his lips on her mouth before she realized what was taking place.

Her mind balked at the unwanted intimacy, but only for a moment. She pulled her face away from his. "Allen?" she asked, obvious she needed clarification for his unexpected action.

"Wot, Pet? C'mon," he attempted to cajole her, "a friendly gesture, a welcome-back, that's all-you've been missin' for days, haven't you? With us beside ourselves in lookin' for you? And now, here you are, in the flesh. Just a friendly gesture. A little smack on the old kisser, a little 'how-d'ye-do'."

Her eyes flashed a look that told him she would overlook such an act of 'friendship' just this once. "Geis has promised he will release Mitch today," she told him, quickly attempting to move past his social misstep to important matters of the now.

"No doubt all will wonder and marvel at how you managed that," he told her, more than a small spark in his eye as he looked at her. "_Brilliant_!"

Her eyebrows registered dismay, her tone, slightly righteous. "Well, I asked him, of course. He knew he had no reason to take Mitch in the first place. He only did it to appease the Kommandant over the loss of Carter. The Kommandant, who has now, with Eleri, had to rapidly move on to more important things."

"_Brilliant_," Allen echoed himself, his tongue to the underside of his top teeth as he smiled at her. When he looked at her, here, now, in this low lighting, among this usually servants-only environment, her shorn hair altering the look of her so that she became more like a girl Lady Marion might have as a distant American cousin; beautiful, but less regal, less unattainable, it was here he could imagine her in the voice of the Nightwatch, courageous and bold to a fault. Had the face of this woman (this new woman before him) been on an enlistment poster he would have gladly joined up before Poland had even fallen.

The forgiving light concealed for the most part her cheek stitches and her now-healing trauma from the gag she had worn.

He was not so twitterpated that he didn't know that he was never going to get another chance like this again, that if he wanted to go all in it was now or never. Allen Dale wasn't a crack confidence man for nothing.

He did not give her a moment to object. He did not bother, as he might with another girl, another situation, to turn on the full Allen, to first take her hand in his, interlace the fingers, thumb stroking the well of her palm; let his other hand's fingers play along the slope of her neck, her earlobe, a fleeting visit to her collarbone, couldn't-miss caresses like the soft beating of butterfly wings.

But this was his moment. _His_ moment, not with the real Marion. That, of course, wasn't gonna happen in _this_ lifetime. No, this was his moment with the Nightwatch, with the woman he had spent countless nights lying awake imagining, loving as much as a person could love a disembodied voice, an unknown partisan, an ideal.

As much as his first, ill-timed kiss only moments ago had surprised her, he knew, this one stunned her far more. It was that 'what is going on, here?' gap in her reaction time that he took full advantage of.

Both her hands flew up like she was the victim in a bank hold-up, and he managed to get his left arm underneath an elbow and about her waist as he kissed her with all the intensity, all the longing he had been saving up those many nights for the unknown voice on the other end of the wireless. Even so, the moment of the kiss could have lasted no longer than ten seconds.

The door from the main house opened in on them. It nearly cracked into his hip. It had been pushed open by Eva Heindl. Her eyes quickly registered the identities of both people in front of her, as well as what appeared to her to be their consensual embrace. Without saying a word, without making a noise of any kind, she stepped back into the main house and let the servants' door close, restoring their solitude.

Doubly-startled by being walked-in on, Marion found the control of her own hands again, and pushed against Allen's shoulders to free herself. It proved easy enough, his hold on her neither aggressive nor harsh.

At the contact of her hands on his shirt, he stepped away from her.

"You gormless-_toad_," she berated him, "what could you possibly think you are doing?" Her voice recalled her to herself, and she lowered its pitch and volume. "Here, in my house-" she reached for something potentially more punishing to draw his attention to, "the billet of a Nazi lieutenant _to whom I am engaged_-you chose to-you-"

"Assault you, Pet?" he offered, his tone more bemused than chastened.

"_Insult_ me. Not once, but twice!"

"Not tryin' to be funny," he said, himself plenty satisfied with the outcome, a lopsided grin on his lips, "but _I_ didn't find it insulting."

"You keep clear of me, Allen, do you hear?" she threatened. "Keep well clear."

"Settle, yourself, now," he assured her. "I've no intention of stealing any further honey coolers, nor any of your other favors, _Lady_ Marion. It's only, I was thinkin' of the Nightwatch, is all. I didn't know it was you, 'til your kidnapping and wot."

Her indignation slackened not a bit at this explanation. "And so you have stolen what neither Robin, _nor Geis, even_, tried to take. All for a girl who doesn't exist. _Grow up_."

He shrugged, scratched at the back of his head. He was a sporting man. "If you want, we can have another go, see if you can steal it back..."

"_You_ are an absolute, unqualified idiot, Allen Dale."

Here he smirked, charmed by her berating of him, himself so pleased her scolding could not truly touch him. "And _you_ are involved with two men simultaneously, _each_ with a claim on you. And yet you require a third to get your kissin' done?" He cocked his head, pretending to suss it out, "Who's the idiot now, Pet?"

It was a good thing there was nothing set out, waiting to be carried into the main house, for, glass or crystal, porcelain or victuals, she well likely might have thrown it. At him.

The lighting must've improved, if only for a brief moment, as Allen saw the destructive thoughts coalescing in her eyes, and chose a hasty retreat, though all in all he would have to claim victory for himself in their encounter, if a bittersweet one at that.

He had no plans to ever trespass so again, it was over, this was the last time. But he did find himself wondering if, with the Nightwatch's return this evening, he might not be treated to the record now spinning in his head, "_You know the one I love belongs to somebody else/That's why she sings her songs for somebody else/(And even when you have your arms around her, Papa, you know her thoughts are for somebody else)/And when I hold her hands (You know)/They belong to somebody (somebody else)/And you can bet, they're not so cold to somebody else..._"

His Nightwatch fascination was through, there would never be a going-back again to where he could imagine her as _his_ girl. She would always be Marion, now (though he had never yet heard the sounds of that voice pass through her lips), the Lady Marion, set to wed the Jerry Gisbonnhoffer, ever sharing (perhaps, he was not sure, but certainly there was still something there) sparks with his commanding officer Oxley, enough to scrap with him.

Oxley, he knew, loved the girl. The entire unit (well, except perhaps for Royston, who had the peculiar talent of nodding off to sleep during stories of any duration) knew Oxley loved the girl.

Long before their feet had set on the dry land of the Channel Islands those many months ago, in those times of battles and enforced-until-it-became-second-nature camaraderie when men spoke of such things, Robin's stories, Robin's dreams, had always been of her.

Perhaps she was right. Perhaps in kissing her Allen had betrayed his friend, stolen something that was not his. "_It's tough to be alone on a shelf/And it's worse to fall in love by your self_." But the quick-talking spin-artist within him told him if given a chance, he could make Robin understand. He wasn't doing this anymore, alright? It was over. He would not behave so again. After all, it was the Nightwatch he had taken a run at. "_But when the one you love belongs to somebody else_." Another girl entirely.

* * *

Forsaking the servants' stair (which Allen used to beat his welcome-to-her retreat), Marion pushed through the door to the main house. She flinched to see Eva there, only steps away from the door where she had walked in on...

Eva looked at Marion with her clear, un-quixotic gaze. "There are some very strange things going on around here of late, _Cherie_," she said, offering not another word about it as she walked past Marion and through the passage to the stair, now clear of unexpected trysts, of misguided lovers, once again merely a conveniently concealed conduit between Barnsdale's kitchen and attic.

**...TBC...**

* * *

Author's Note: _Never think leaving a review doesn't matter. More than several bits in this chapter are the result of reader reviews/questions/PMs or requests._


	9. London SIS HQ  Sir Edward

**London, HQ British Secret Intelligence Service -** Roger Stoker sat alone in the ad hoc office space he had been given once it became apparent Operation Pellinore was not to launch as swiftly as first expected. Alone, save for several growing stacks of manila folders and reel-to-reel tapes. At times he felt like a research librarian who had found an abandoned study carrel among the stacks where some absent-minded researcher had walked away from a lifetime's worth of materials, all needing to be re-shelved and re-archived (after first figuring out which papers went to which folders, which tapes into which sleeves). The coded system in place at MI-6 certainly did not make such tasks as straightforward as might be.

Perhaps it was his frustration with this ever-amassing clutter that caused him to begin listening to the entirety of the reel-to-reels made of the Channel Islands' Nightwatch broadcast, not just for embedded code, but also for the music. Perhaps it was his pent-up need to do something in the wake of his mission's deferral and the presence of no further orders. Perhaps it was simply a way to pass the long days at a desk that served no particular purpose: his raid planned, his bags packed, his mind ready, his orders? Wait.

He would find himself, inevitably, wondering about her song selection, her set list: were they codes as well, codes for someone else? For a local Resistance cell? And what, he wondered, had occurred over those two nights when she had broadcast not at all? Was that, perhaps, also, a code? A means of communicating something?

He was now listening to the broadcast from October seventeenth, her first night back on the air. "_With each word your tenderness grows, tearing my fear apart/And that knot that wrinkles your nose, touches my foolish heart_." Something significant must have happened over those two days, for shortly following the song would be the coded transmission telling SIS two things: one, a downed pilot had been rescued from the enemy and was being held in a safe location, and two (far more troubling), a member of 1192 had been captured, his cover in tact. "_Lovely, never never change/Keep that breathless charm/Won't you please arrange it, 'cause I love you..._" It was his third full listen-through of that night. He re-scoured her every spoken sentence, turning it over in his mind to assure himself he had not missed any other coded statements meant for the ever-listening HQ. "..._Just the way you look tonight_."

He wondered, did she know? This American girl, somehow weirdly trapped on the Islands, under the German Occupation; could she know the good she was doing for Britain? The valuable information that she was passing on? Could she know that her voice had been played for Churchill himself? ('My mother was an American, you know,' he had reminded them.) That shiploads of British soldiers patrolling the Channel (both under and on the water) tuned their wirelesses to her of an early morning? That the small act of rebellion she enacted nightly on the small island of Guernsey had such a far-reaching influence?

Certainly it was highly unlikely she could have imagined him in this poky little room three floors underground repeatedly examining her broadcasts, introspectively musing on her motivations.

There was a knock at his door. It was too bold, too crisp to belong to the shy secretary he shared with two other chaps down the hall.

He never had visitors. He did not think, even, anyone but that secretary knew where this hole of an office was located, much less that he was being housed inside.

"In a tick!" he replied to the knock, trying, to comical effect, to re-assemble, hide or obscure the mound of literature and tapes on the desk, to stow the cumbersome player. Finally, deciding it would take too long to do so, he retrieved his winter longcoat from its hook on the wall, and draped it over the top.

His desk now resembled something of a beached humpback whale. He stepped to unlock the door, realizing he would not be able to take up a position behind the desk and its now-coated heap of documents without being entirely eclipsed by it.

"Stoke!" came the voice of Clem Nighten as the door opened in. "Egad! They've done you no favors. What a dismal cell they've condemned you to! Almost dungeon-like. Whomever did you offend?" Nighten's eyes went to the curious lump on the desk, capped off by Stoker's longcoat. Clem smiled at bit at the visual, but did not inquire further.

Such was the life of an SIS man. Who knew what anyone knew? With so many secrets, one had no way of knowing who knew what, and when. They were all in a sort of eternal bluffing match. Unless Clem came out and told him about Pellinore, in total, he had to assume Clem knew nothing of it. Certainly _he_ did not know what Clem got up to these days. It was best, of course, the right hand not knowing what the left was doing. Safer that way, surely.

"Moment to chat?" Clem inquired.

"Sure, sure," Stoker consented, indicating his brother-in-law, Nighten, should have a seat in the second of only two chairs the room held. _He_ leaned against the front of the shrouded desk.

"Not sure I would find you still about, Stoke. Thought for certain you'd be off and away from us again. Claire will be glad to hear it."

"She is well?"

"She is why I wanted to find you, actually," Nighten confessed, politely settling matter of courtesy regarding his sister-in-law and nephews first. "Evelyn and the boys happy to have you home for a stretch?"

Stoker nodded.

"Good. Excellent." A small smirk of mischievousness played at the corner of his lips. "Claire and I shall be having similar responsibilities soon, I am informed."

"What? A baby on the way?" Stoker did not have to fake pleasure at the news. "Your first!"

"...That I know of!" Nighten gruffly quipped, and the two laughed good-naturedly at the predictably cheeky jest.

"Well, you are getting old enough," Stoker warned. He tapped his fingers to his temples, where Nighten had begun to show signs of war-brought-on grey.

Clem cleared his throat. Apparently there was more to his happy announcement. "I...wanted to ask if you might speak with her."

"Certainly! I shall ring to congratulate her straight away." He reached for the office's phone, recalling at the last minute that it, too, was shared with two other chaps down the hall. That it, in point of fact, was _located_ with the two other chaps down the hall.

"Yes, do that, but..." Nighten turned less gregarious for a moment. "I do not think you know, but this is not the first time Claire and I have...had reason to hope."

Stoker had not known.

"We have suffered disappointment on three separate occasions since the wedding."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"Certainly, you were away," Clem sympathized. "Evelyn's mind on your survival and safe return. The Italian Front is no child's sandbox, Stoke. I have read the reports. We thought it best not to trouble you with our misfortune. But now, the doctor, well...We eat as well as anyone in England, better than most I should say, but, the doctor is blaming our previous disappointments on stress, and poor nutrition. Rationing what it is in London, he suggests Claire go to the country for the air and the produce."

"Why, that sounds fine. Just the right sort of suggestion."

"Yes, but our country house and estate...I submitted Lincoln Greene to HQ for Army use. There will be no place for her there at the Greene. The staff were dismissed to seek war work. I believe it now houses a school for paratroopers, or the like."

"That is a strange sight to imagine," Stoker interjected, recalling the coveted pastoral setting of the ancestral home of the Nighten family. "Although Lady Nighten would surely approve of the amount and quality of silk in their chutes."

"Yes," Clem agreed dryly, "if not its primary function."

They smiled companionably.

Clem continued to outline his plan. "I've managed to secure an invitation for her from the father of one of our old schoolmates: Oxley. Do you recall him? They-that is, the Earl, his father, has a nice estate. Kirk Leaves it's called. Fresh air, riding, green, green, green until it makes you homesick for cobblestones."

"_Oxley_," Stoker faked remembering, "yes. The crash. I was the one who dogged him for so long to enlist, you know."

"Did you? No, had no idea." Clem sat more somberly at the notion. "Sorry draw, that."

"Quite," Stoker agreed, hoping the continued well-being of Unit 1192 did not show on his face. All the while wondering if Clem was hoping the same for himself. Again, no telling who knew what, the central conundrum of intelligence work. It was entirely possible they would both be called to a meeting someday only to discover each other knew everything about the files under his longcoat on the desk. But it was also entirely possible both of them would survive this war, go to their retirement, and never discover if they shared a common knowledge of Oxley's being yet alive.

Nighten's speech quickened in pace, as if trying to bike away from the mention of his once quite good friend's (and nearly brother-in-law's) grisly death. "Anyways, Claire says she won't leave London, that she won't go. I thought perhaps you could speak to her, try to put it in a better light. It's not like I'm asking her to go to Scotland, after all. And it's for..."

Stoker could tell his brother-in-law had not often used the new word in regard to the coming event. He smiled as a man who had been in a similar position, once.

"...the baby."

"I will meet her tomorrow for luncheon," Stoker promised. "We'll have her, _and my niece or nephew_," he smiled, "on the early evening train. You have my word."

"Good man," said Clem, extending a grateful hand for the shaking. "Good man."

* * *

**Guernsey - 17th October -** In the wake of Eva descending the servants' stair down to the kitchens, Marion took the house's main stair up to the second level, and toward her father's suite of rooms. She could hear noise and commotion coming from what had been her mother's suite-now to be housing Elerinne Vaiser, the Kommandant's unexpected arrival. Allen and several footmen had been set to the task of helping install her belongings in the rooms.

If he knew what was good for him, Robin's brother-in-arms would keep his nose well to the task at hand, and trouble her no further today (or any other day, for that matter) with his errant lips.

The moving-in of Fraulein Vaiser was an uncomfortable moment for Marion, for all that her mother had never slept (save the occasion mid-afternoon nap) in her appointed bedchamber, as was the usual order of the day for married couples of a certain age and social status. Lady Miranda Nighten may have unconventionally shared common a bed with her husband, but that suite of rooms was still very much hers. Her flawless sense of style and deft hand at decoration were evident everywhere, the smallest touches of perfection at every turn, the best fabrics, the softest linens; summer clothes still hanging in wait for her in the room's two armoires, as though she might be catching a car from St. Peter Port out to the estate this very afternoon. Of course, were that the case, the room would have been aired out, cleaned within an inch of its life, the linens changed, flowers cut from among those in the park (or the estate's much-admired hothouse) and brought in to fragrance it for her ladyship.

A dainty selection of her mother's favorite nibbles would have been prepared, arranged impeccably on a silver tray and immaculately starched doily, and left on the small round table between the two comfortable chairs that faced the room's fireplace.

_This_ was how Barnsdale had always welcomed its beloved lady.

Lady Nighten's first order of arrival would have been to select from one of those armoires what she would wear to dine that evening and instruct Eva to have it aired, pressed, and ready. Upon the car carrying her being sighted coming up the drive, Eva would have slapped the youngest footman (nine, if that) on the bum, bidding him get upstairs immediately and begin drawing Lady Nighten's bath. Marion's mother would retire to that bath directly upon having greeted her husband with a kiss and an unnecessary reminder that dinner would be served at a quarter-past six (it always was).

This was how Marion would know her mother was at Barnsdale. This was how Marion would know that all was right in the world.

But Eva had not been here to wait upon Lady Nighten. And no one had thought (or knew) to instruct the staff to clean and air the room. The foodstuffs for her mother's favorite savories were impossible to acquire. Hard, even, on the Guernsey black market. No, Lady Nighten was not returned to the Islands, to her family. It was Eleri Vaiser, another interloper.

It was Geis that had claimed Clem's room (shortly after claiming the estate), and now this unknown girl had claimed her mother's. It was as though Marion's family was being replaced, one member at a time. As though it was not enough the Germans must take over the Islands, they also wished her home, her very relatives. And as much as it hurt and saddened her, she feared what it might do to her father to see his adored wife's boudoir turned into _haut_ lodgings for a Nazi's unwanted daughter.

She walked into her father's suite, and toward its attached sunroom, where she felt certain at this time of day he might be. She had not seen him since being returned from her kidnapping. Day one, her trip to Alderney with Dick Giddons, night one. Day two, at the mercy of a mistaken Thomas Carter, night two. Day three Robin, night three: La Salle's barn. So here it was, day four, afternoon fading into evening, finally, returned to Barnsdale.

"Father?" she called, softly, so as not to awaken him if he were napping. She turned the corner to step fully into the sunroom, its glass walls of windows magnifying the dying afternoon sun so that the polished wood floors appeared to be ablaze. Sir Edward, Lord Nighten was standing beside the gramophone, about the change the record once it finished the last moments of playing.

He was in his favorite smoking jacket, worn over a collared shirt and neatly pressed trousers held up by braces. He was looking tidy and self-aware. Something inside her eased at this. Perhaps her time gone missing had not troubled him as she had feared it might. His mind understood time so poorly anymore. He may think her gone but a moment, rather than nearly half a sennight.

He started at the sight of her, as though she had sneaked up on him. "I say," he asked her, "what are you doing here?" There was something about his tone that was unpleasantly affronted, the way he drew in his chin.

Used to his topsy-turvy ways over these past years she smiled and ignored his question. "Hello, Father. I came up to see you before getting ready for dinner." She did not know how she was to broach the subject of their newest permanent "houseguest". She supposed she would have to make up some rot about the girl being a friend of hers come down from London. He would not retain what she said about the awkward situation, anyway. She only needed something plausible to get by, moment-to-moment.

"What are you doing here," he asked her again. "You ought to use the door to the kitchens. _I_ have nothing for you, here. You must go. Now." He seemed to be trying to shoo her away. "Be gone!" But his tone fell to a whisper, almost as though he thought she were here to menace him, as though he confronted the ghost in _Hamlet_'s first act.

"Father?" She moved to put her hand comfortingly on his arm, certain she could return him to knowing her, as he always had, no matter how jumbled the rest of his mind became.

"Eva!" Edward shouted, at first commandingly, and then quite close to hysterically. "Eva! Eva! I must have you here immediately!" His agitation was palpable.

Marion was speechless to hear him call for Eva Heindl, when his own daughter was before him. When he got like this, when the paranoia of confusion gripped him, _she_ was the only one able to make him calm. _Not Eva_. Marion stepped back from him as though he had slapped her across the face, or called her a slur.

There was a flurry of rushed tread in the hall, and Allen Dale appeared at the suite's doorway. He saw Marion, and spoke to her, rather that her father, though his eyes quickly took in the borderline deranged fear of Lord Nighten's frantic state.

"Can I be of help?" he asked Marion, the genuine desire to assist clearly visible in his eyes.

"No, thank you," she said to him, her tone as close to harsh as could be. _She could handle this. She was handling this. She did not need him acting the busybody, not him, not now, of all people_.

But her father stepped over her words, responding to Allen's recognizable chauffeur uniform, and mistaking him for Barnsdale staff. "Yes! What was it again?" Sir Edward asked Allen for his name.

"Dale, Sir," Allen replied, obediently, his eyes straying to Marion's as he spoke his answer. "Dale Allen."

"Yes, _of course_, Mr. Allen." Her father spoke to him as though he had simply forgotten his driver's name. Something of composure returned to him. "Would you be so kind as to escort this woman to the kitchens? She seems to have gotten lost and found her way up here to the family's quarters." He indicated Marion.

"Sir?" the bewilderment painting Allen's tone was unmistakable.

Eva Heindl arrived, visible over Allen's shoulder. "_Merci_, Mr. Dale," she told him, paying him not so much as a look over her own shoulder as she passed him by, sailing into the room. She threw Marion a perplexed look, and went, as bidden, to Sir Edward's side.

"This woman," he whispered to her, loud enough that Marion and Allen (who, though doubly dismissed, had not yet left) could hear what was being said. "As you see, the village laundress has invaded my private chamber to look for my washing. I have told her she must go retrieve what there is of it from the kitchens, but she will not attend!"

"Father?" Marion tried again to reach out to him. Her mind would not accept what she was hearing. Her reaction to his belief was slowed, as though underwater. She did not wish to accept what he was saying, and so she continued to press her case to him.

His behavior became further agitated.

"_Cherie_," Eva told her from where she stood, not leaving Sir Edward's side, "you _must_ go. For now, just...Mr. Dale, can you...?"

"Right-o," agreed Allen with a brisk nod of his head, stepping to where Marion stood speechless in wake of what was playing out before her. He wrestled a moment with whether or not to touch her, and finally reached his hands to gently but commandingly steer her clear of the suite, as, aimlessly, she made no move to leave on her own.

As they passed through the doorway, Marion tried to explain, her words coming out in a very small voice, "he is, he is only thinking of a game we used to play when I was a child. He is simply...confused."

"Easy, there," Allen encouraged her as they walked along the second floor landing's room doors. "You have forgotten, but you don't look of yourself just now, Pet. Your face is stitched and swollen, your hair's been shorn within an inch of your life. Your frock's not your own, you're a bit bruisey all over. Might take you for a rough-and-tumble village washerwoman meself."

"Might you?" she asked, her tone one of challenge, some of her spirit returning, if not her energy. She found she leaned on him to keep moving far more than she would have liked. "And might that rough-and-tumble village woman let you steal a kiss? No, two?"

He scoffed at her calling him out. "Ah! Well, it was me last chance, weren't it?"

She didn't answer as they stepped further along the corridor. "No," she instructed him when he tried to open the door to Clem's room. "That is where Geis sleeps."

As Allen moved further down the hall, supporting her as much as she would let him, he tried to assure her, "give yourself a day or two to get the swelling down, get your hair in a snood or like it's up in a hat, and go to see him again. But a whole different story, that. Promise."

He did not let her feet stop moving, but she slowed even further and turned to look him in the eyes, taking her time to fully examine what they might show her of his motives, his intentions toward her, and whether this was all still some sort of flim-flam he perpetrated to ambush her again as he had on the servants' stair. She could discern nothing there that did not track as utterly genuine. Still, she remained wary. "Perhaps Mitch is back at La Salle's by now," she offered, by way of striking a tenuous accord, as he opened the door for her to enter her own rooms.

"Let us hope," he concurred. "Though it will be sometime before I will know it. Kommandant has left, posting me here for the night and tomorrow. I'm to get you and Miss Eleri, there, sorted in St. Peter Port. She is to have whatever she wishes from the shops (though who's to say what they might have left to sell), and you are to act as her chaperone."

It did not surprise Marion at all that the Kommandant would expect such, without regard to her current physical ailments, or her (as he himself well knew) shock at discovering Geis' telegrams. Vaiser had been inconvenienced by his daughter's arrival. He was the kind of man who would certainly feel it was an inconvenience to be spread around, rather than kept to himself.

Allen waited, surprisingly proper, at the threshold of her rooms.

She wondered if he knew how many times to date Robin had trespassed upon such propriety. "There will be a spare bed in the men's servants' hall two flights up," she told Allen. Her mind spiraled in a way that tellingly revealed her as Lady Nighten's daughter, and acting mistress of the house. "Tell Mr. Clun I wish for it to be readied for you. And, as the circumstances are so peculiar, Eleri knowing only you and myself, come to dinner this evening, quarter past six." She saw the surprise in his face. He made no effort to conceal it. Any other time, Allen Dale would certainly not be asked to dine with the Nightens of Barnsdale. "Your uniform will do," she instructed him, "if you keep your coat smartly buttoned. And Allen? Pinch what you like of Cook's spread. In fact, later tonight meet me in the kitchen before the Nightwatch. I will send you with some coffee and tobacco for Stephen. Though we ourselves have not much. Only, stay clear of the wine cellar." She paused to give her command emphasis. "Geis knows it by heart, better than any Nighten ever has, and anything you take _will be_ missed, and someone unjustly punished." She turned to walk deeper into her room.

He called after her, "On your boat ride toward the German garrison he told you, didn't he?"

She swiveled her head over her shoulder to ask, "Told me what?"

Allen had cracked a grin. "Told you about the 'coffee situation'." He snickered. "It's one of his top three perpetual complaints of the Occupation right now, just behind..."

Marion cut him off, so very, very tired. _So much yet to do_. But she did not do so unkindly. "Well, he will be glad to have it when he is returned." Her smile was faint, but authentic.

"True, that," he said, pulling her door to, returning himself further down the corridor, to the trunks yet to heave and hoist, and settle, to the decidedly petulant Fraulein Vaiser's liking.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**Author's Apology:** _Yes, the opening scene of this chapter, with Roger Stoker in London, takes place about a week or so after the Guernsey portion (which occurs, as stated, on October 17, 1943, four days after Marion's kidnapping). It immediately follows the preceding section from Guernsey/Barnsdale with Allen feeling amorous in the servants' stair.  
In essence, Stoker is listening to the recording of the Nightwatch that Marion, in the present-time (October 17th) has yet to record. Hopefully this is not so much a transgression against chronological storytelling that one can't get past it.  
Please accept my regrets if it is, and I beg, won't you come back and read some more next time if I promise never to err so again?_


	10. Unexpected Visitors  Grey Goose Club

**Alderney -** He should never have slipped up, having to cop to a youthful knowledge of Marion. Though Gisbonnhoffer himself had seemed interested solely in re-hashing old times and having a chat about his fiancee, and certainly had not lifted so much as a finger to hurt or attempt to physically persuade him, this other devil, 'Specialist Joseph' as he had heard him called, seemed to find some sick pleasure in hurting him without any clear objective. He never even asked any questions. He just hooked him up to that damned machine and started playing with the switches.

There were moments where Mitch found he desperately longed to be asked something, just so he could break (in whatever way was wished) and be released (even though probably only momentarily) from its sadistic grip.

* * *

**Sark - Farm of Blind La Salle -** The Nazi law forbidding assembly had not kept many away. Stephen, himself, seemed the only one unsurprised by this.

It had been decided Robin and Wills would attend the funeral service, Carter and Djak (now de-loused) would be hidden in one of the barns further afield (though not in the 'shit shack' hideaway, things not that desperate, yet). Carter had sensed something of a weird new tension between Wills and the Gypsy boy since their time in La Salle's washhouse. Before Wills had left them to their waiting game in the distant barn, the RAF pilot had asked about it.

"Oh, that," Wills had said, averting his eyes slightly. "We had a bit of a dust-up, we two...over the bath."

"Really?" Carter replied. "I have always heard the highest praise for the hygiene of his people."

"Well," Wills confessed, "'twas not over _the bath_, in point of fact. He wouldn't take off his clothes and get started, and when I went after him about it, his shirt ripped in the scuffle, and he drew a knife on me."

"A knife?" Carter asked, throwing a sideways glance at the boy. "Thought we'd shaken him down as good as could be at Mrs. Rufford's."

"So did I," agreed Wills, knowing a sheen of sweat was probably starting to bloom on his upper lip at the questioning over the last forty-five minutes he had just spent. He resettled the shirt he had found to put on about his shoulders, thankful for its relative warmth. "He seemed to think I was set to rape him." He swallowed hard, surprised at how difficult it was proving to continue to invert the gender pronouns.

Carter muttered what had the sounds of a very eloquent curse in a language Wills could not understand, he assumed Russian. But he knew it was not directed at him, it was for the Jerries, and their camps, and their soulless behavior toward their fellow man that would put such fear (such a very real fear) into a boy. Believing he could expect harm even from among his new protectors.

"Don't worry," Carter referenced the fact he had not been there to smooth things with translating, "it won't happen again."

"No," Wills half-coughed. "_That_ won't happen again." He was not sure when the best time would be to bring up the subject of Djak's female status. Whether it would be best to share it first with Carter, or wait until he could speak to be understood well enough to Djak to ask him..._her_ what her wishes in the matter were. Was it more likely she would be sent away from the unit if it were known? Was it possible Robin might flinch at housing and operating with a girl, a woman, so close to his men? Would he expect that her sex might cause trouble, division or distraction?

Wills wasn't sure. Might be best to take it up with Mitch first, if only one could truly depend upon him keeping his mouth shut.

* * *

At the farmhouse as Stephen greeting mourners, he was feeling good about the turn-out, feeling pleased with the outcome of his session with the flier.

"Where are you from, in America?" he had asked shortly after sharing with him what his new identity would be.

"New Jersey," Carter had told him. "A city called Hoboken."

"A Jerseyman after all!" Stephen had nearly clapped his hands.

"Jersey _boy_ is more the term used there."

"Yes, but don't you see? What a gift we have been given-we needn't even lie when others ask where you have come to me from. '_Jersey_' we shall answer, clear of conscience, and never afraid of slipping up or forgetting."

Carter smile came on slowly at the former rector's delight.

"We may thank the Lord," Stephen instructed, "and the good works of Jersey's long-ago Bailiff and governor, Carteret, who received that auspicious colonial land grant from Charles II, and so dubbed this territory on which your Hoboken sits, 'New' Jersey." He leaned in for a moment, as though selling a joke, "though I think he could not have imagined us, nor our present predicament."

But here was Robin, and by the feel of the air about him, not simply arrived only to join the ready-to-begin service. Oxley stepped close to him and warned, "there are soldiers sighted, three visible, coming up the lane."

Stephen did know Oxley would have exchanged significant looks with Wills Reddy at this dismayingly dire news.

But Stephen was not to be deterred. He did not attempt to keep the news secret, but turned and shared it with the ten others present. Surely, he felt, whether to stay or go, or attempt to hide in the wake of their imminent discovery was up to each individual's conscience and potential fortitude in the light of possible imprisonment.

"One of my men," he referenced Robin, "has seen soldiers on the lane. Their only destination, I think, can be the house. You each must do as you must, but I will have us start the service now, that we may finish what we may before their arrival." He inclined his head over to where he last knew Dick's parents to be located, and put on a hopeful expression.

The tiny gathering had sung two short hymns when a fist was heard at the very near front door. Not entirely like the angry pounding of the other night, but reminiscent enough that he knew he should feel fear at the sound of it. But he did not. Everything in the world was here for him, save Louise. If now were his time to part with life, she was the only regret that he would carry with him to his last breath.

He knew that if _she_ were here she would have spent the past hours bicycling from tenement to tenement to invite mourners to attend, and she would have thought his holding the service indoors, rather than out on the lawn to accommodate a larger crowd, somewhat chicken-livered, or at the very least, reserved.

La Salle signaled for Wills to open the door.

Three Germans, an odd number of soldiers, walked in. They said nothing, scanning the small gathering, noting those in attendance. They wore sidearms, but no rifles. They took no seats (there were none left, most present already stood) and did not speak.

Silence fell. Since silence, to a blind man, was like utter darkness to those sighted, Stephen worked to illumine it.

Because the soldiers had not introduced themselves, simply arriving much as had the other mourners, though a little late, he did not know who they were. He simply had to trust that Robin and Wills were present, and, he knew, would do the utmost possible to protect the Sarkese gathered here to mourn Dick.

And so he went on as though nothing of particular note had taken place. "We are here today to mourn Dick, who was a much-loved, and loving son, a good friend to many, and above all, a child of God." He cleared his throat, an unusual show of nerves for him, but he had not spoken in a service for many years now. "In my life I have known many things. I have known kindness, and I have known cruelty. I have heard the stories of many people, with lives different from my own, concerns and cares-emotional crises that do not mirror my own. But I will say this: when we look at these past trials, these past struggles, our lives and our focus before the war-what are they to us, now? In light of the world as we now see it, as we now struggle against it? Are they not like ridiculous, silly worries-the foolish buzzing of a fly-in comparison with displaced loved ones, sons in harm's way, the map of the world re-ordered, food and warmth, _kindness_ so hard for many to find?

"What do our past woes of gossip or small gluttonies have to do with nineteen hundred and forty three? Where every day we are asked to make choices; to betray, to lift up, to contribute to what is wrong, or act upon what is right? All the while knowing the consequences.

"These past days, sitting with Dick, both while he lived and yet worked for me, with me, and then, sitting with him when I am the only one of us two with a spirit still on earth, I begin to think that I understand what is, what _will_ ultimately _be_ the greatest challenge of our generation. The most substantial crisis of our time.

"Certainly _I_ have spent many hours wrestling with it. I do not doubt you have, as well, though you may not have seen it in such a grand sense. It is, simply, this: how can a benevolent God allow suffering? Does the world being as it is make God less powerful? Less God? Why do the undeserving suffer? Dick? (Though I do not believe he suffered for long.) The Giddons family? Is there a method to it? Is there a work to be done in it?

"The answer I have will not satisfy all, and some not at all, but it is this: God does not promise us earthly ease. He does not promise that we will not have to take a stand in our lives, that persecution and bereavement will not occur. He promises us the end. And Dick now has his end, with God. The cares of this world, the suffering he witnessed and any he may have endured are foreign to him, wiped away, now."

Stephen thought of the unexpected Germans in the room, he thought of Robin Oxley and, farther away from the house, the RAF pilot with whom Robin had such a deep grievance. "The question of suffering will endure," he said, "for when the suffering of 1943 has passed, and, we pray, removed itself from our beloved Islands, it will exist somewhere else in the world, as it has since time began. But for now, I call for forgiveness. For faith that the end will come, the promised end, and that, when it does, we would do well to learn to reconcile ourselves to one another.

"For whomever triumphs in this war, this transient (though it is so hard for us to see it as so) combat will one day end, and we must again coexist in the world. So let us be reconciled to one another, for now, and for the future. Let us resist, with all that is within us, and All that we might beseech from without, repaying evil with evil."

Slowly the mourners began to file past the wooden casket holding Dick. No one spoke as might usually be the case at a small family funeral, the Germans dampening any version of normal behavior among those in attendance, most of whom were convinced arrest was minutes away, especially after the nothing-short-of-seditious homily La Salle had just given.

The three Germans approached Stephen. The atmosphere in the room fell further silent, the air immobile. The first man stopped and extended his hand for the shaking. "Sir," the man said, his heels nearly clicking together with the salutation.

"_ReichKaptain_ Lamburg," asked the former rector, surprise in his voice at recognizing a man he had met only a handful of times at Chief Pleas, "it is you?"

"_Ja_," admitted the soft-spoken officer, the highest-ranking German permanently billeted on Sark (the island not large enough to require the oversight of an Island Kommandant). "My friends and I wished to pay our respects to your man, Giddons, and his family. I trust we have not distressed anyone present?" His delivery of the question, though slow and considered, as was his way, rang with an unforced sincerity.

"We are privileged you came," Stephen told him, his own left hand coming to locate Lamburg's right, put out for the shaking.

The ReichKaptain leaned in to offer am earnest word of caution to the rector, "Mr. La Salle, your tenement is valuable to the feeding of our forces. You have not proven a problem of any kind. And while I respect your words just now, as do the men here with me, you _must_ be more vigilant in your discretion in days to come. As with your run-in with Gisbonnhoffer," the ReichKaptain allowed himself a glance at La Salle's ears, "I will not always be able to shield you as I would wish to shield all Sark from the brunt of the Fuehrer's harsh designs on these Islands." He unclasped Stephen's hand, bringing his hand to grip the blind man's bicep in a gesture of comfort. "Please, will you now have sufficient manpower to work your acreage?"

Stephen nodded, and thanked him for inquiring.

"Perhaps," Lamburg continued, "I might come by sometime when it is convenient for you, and your many chores, and we might discuss further (though prudently) some of the philosophy you have just shared so eloquently in your discourse?"

* * *

**Guernsey - Barnsdale Estate -** It was late, after midnight, but not late enough yet to leave for the Nightwatch. She should have been excited, champing at the bit, as it were, to return herself to the airwaves. In doing so to save whatever lives of women Kommandant Vaiser may have set aside in St. Peter Port for shooting tomorrow if the Nightwatch again failed to broadcast.

She had slept some time following dinner, but she had had no time to tune to BBC, no time to discover any true Island news to share between the records she would play. Perhaps she would have to reference the Guernsey women taken and executed...she hated to think of it...in her name. Perhaps it was best to remain silent on that account and not mention it. The voice of the Nightwatch again broadcasting would prove enough of a slap in the face of the Germans, surely. No, it would be the _Sanctus_ of Faure's Requiem. It would irritate the Jerries she had not chosen the Mozart, instead. Austrian, like their sick little Chancellor. _No, not much in common, one hoped, with the Fuehrer and Wolfgang Amadeus_.

She went over in her head the things Robin had instructed her to say, the coded phrases and words he needed her to work in, particularly about Carter's escape.

But her mind would not stay obedient and on-task. She kept finding herself looking into the waters stirring slightly in the Barnsdale indoor pool. It was a modest swimming pool, if such could be said for such an extravagance (much less such an extravagance that still managed-through Gisbonnhoffer's bequest-to function and be maintained during the limits of the Occupation).

One entered into the natatorium through the estate's attached hothouse, far less a planting shed than a display area for the flowers and plants of which the island's mild climate encouraged the proliferation.

The hothouse (which would have been dubbed 'the conservatory' at home, were it larger and more grand in its furnishings) held several benches and rattan chairs, but she found she rarely ever stopped in there, always convinced it seemed like getting waylaid mid-journey. The swimming pool had ever seemed the appropriate end-destination in this wing of the house to her. The always damp (whether from heat in winter or the oppositional cool of summer) tiles smelt of something freeing to her, the occasional statuary ringing the water (and one rather large piece, drilled for a fountain, within in) had, in her vacationing child's mind (and even, she had to confess, now) seemed a merry dance of satyrs and water nymphs, a rite mere mortals were not meant to witness.

This was her place of contemplation, the sun streaking through the many glass panes in the day, the low and subdued electric lighting in use here of an evening birthing its own breed of self-reflection, though no furniture in the space ever proved as comfortable as the inviting waters, the half-giggly, half-soothing feeling of the fountain's fall over one's head, one's face, like a rite of Poseidon.

Sir Edward had not understood the need for a swimming pool at his family's island estate. He had noted that Guernsey was rife with beaches, and ocean aplenty. As this estate was merely a house for summer holidays, what need of an oversized indoor 'bathtub'?

But Marion knew her mother had wanted the pool. Had wanted a solitary place to be near the water, without the public attention, without worries of propriety. And, of course, as always, she had outfitted it with the utmost taste. Like a Roman bath excavated on the Nighten property, its statuary, its ancient tiles and mosaics still in tact, Marion doubted there was another such refined bathing room in all His Majesty's realm.

It was here she had learned to swim before graduating to the choppy sea shallows.

Something stirred in the dark behind several large palm fronds.

"Who's there?" she called.

Elerinne Vaiser stepped out and showed herself, her eyes taking in the impressive space around her.

"Oh," said Marion, "Elerinne."

"Please, Lady Marion, do not call me that! No one _ever_ calls me that. Call me Eleri. Why are you so sad? Do you mind so very much going to the shops with me tomorrow?" The girl's conversation had much in common with the pool's overflowing fountain. "Are you in any pain?"

Marion smiled in spite of herself. "I imagine I shall be fine tomorrow for visiting St. Peter Port with you."

"Oh, I am that glad! What a wondrous place this is," Eleri's eyes shone with appreciation of it.

"Well, it is not such a large pool..."

"You have seen larger?"

"Well, yes..."

"_Inside_ of a house?"

"Certainly, one or two, even, in London."

"How amazing. How very breathtaking it must've been."

"Possibly," Marion agreed. "Though I dont think anyone spoke or thought as well of them as you do this."

"_Are_ you sad?"

As with many interactions since the Occupation, Marion had to weigh her words carefully, never speaking the fullness of her feelings. "Oh, I was only thinking. Thinking about how I had wished my children to learn to swim, here. That is all, a bit of melancholy."

"Oh, dear," Eleri reacted quite starkly to her confession. "Did the prisoner that kidnapped you, did he do something to prevent you from being able to ever have babies?" A combination of horror and morbid curiosity mixed within the girl's eyes.

"No!" Marion answered, in a rather parental tone to calm what seemed to her oncoming hysteria. "_Certainly_ not."

"Well then, why would you be sad? Why could your and Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer's children _not_ learn to swim here? Or is it that you think the Germans will lose the war, and you will have to leave this place and retreat to Germany to live? You would miss it, I think, such a place of magic."

Eleri's barrage of chatter left Marion's solitary thoughts struggling to keep up. "Patience, Eleri! Or I shall not be able to answer word one of your questions!" Despite her melancholia she found herself smiling at the girl's unabashed eagerness. "Do you always fly at people so?"

"Well, Lady Marion, I have never met a _real_ lady before. That is, my step-father and my mother are out quite a bit in society. He is a baron, of course, but any 'ladies' or noblewomen I met with them were always overly plump grandmothers. And they wore plenty of diamonds, but certainly such stones did little to add to their allure. Not that I saw my mother above once a year, of course."

"Well," began Marion. "The first thing I must ask is you stop addressing me as, 'Lady' Marion until you can manage to be less heavy-handed in your delivery of it. I feel as though you are hammering it at me like a nail too stubborn to sink into the wood. You are meant to be my-mine and Geis'-guest here, so you _must_ call me simply, 'Marion'. Especially if I am meant to call you Eleri so informally."

Fraulein Vaiser's demeanor altered in an instance, her eyes glowing with barely reserved curiosity. "Lady-Marion, do you _like_ my father?"

"Your father, why-the Kommandant." Marion struggled to contain a sigh at the powder keg of a question. "You must understand, Eleri. He is very powerful here among the Islands. And we would do well to remember that, and respect him and his position accordingly."

"Well, not _you_, I'm sure."

"Whyever would you say that?" fear flooded Marion with a speed (in her relative exhaustion) that surprised her.

"Well," Eleri explained her logic, "Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer certainly would not let anyone treat you with anything less than the utmost of respect and courtesy."

"Eleri," Marion asked, "have you even _seen_ Herr Geis to be introduced to him?"

"Well, not exactly, no."

"Then how can you be so certain of the strength of his feelings for me?"

"Well, you're...look at you." Eleri was nearly rendered speechless as she tried to articulate the world she had stumbled into as she understood it. "You're amazing," she referenced Marion's kidnapping (about which she had learned much in her short time here), "and brave and...plucky, and how could any man not be? And he's asked you to marry him, right? To be his and only his alone, forever, right?"

Her fear allayed, confident she was dealing only with an in-love-with-love young woman, Marion let the sigh out. But it was not an unkind one. "Eleri, I think you had best get to bed."

"Where have you put the driver for the night? Is he out in one of the garages?" she stood on tiptoe, as if she might see them through the glass from here, "I wanted to ask him about a scarf I was missing."

"He has been housed with the other men on staff, on the upper-most floor. But propriety," Marion felt quite certain this was a word with which the girl had little familiarity, "dictates that it is too late to disturb him. I shall have him sent to you first thing tomorrow."

"Yes, well, thank you." Fraulein Vaiser moved to exit back out into the hothouse.

"Please remember," Marion called after her, "you are welcome to swim, anytime."

* * *

**London - Grey Goose Gentlemn's Club -** One of the club's staff had brought Sir Robert, Earl of Huntingdon the letter he was studying over during a time in which he usually would be studying one of the day's papers.

He did not know the other members of his club (mostly men of his age or older, as the younger generation were for the most part gone off to the war) had begun to whisper about him when he was not around. To muse on the complete change in the Earl of Huntingdon. Several had wondered, at the inexplicable infusion of gregariousness his nature displayed, if he hadn't succumbed to drink, or possibly (after all this time) women.

Surely something had to be accounted for, for a man once thought the utter definition of staid and dependable, the very embodiment of 'Keep Calm, Carry On'-ness to display a new lightness in his step, to engage in conversations that did not so much as touch on the international situation, stocks, business or government.

He seemed more often at the Grey Goose club these days, or perhaps he was in London the usual amount, yet his presence was simply more notable of late.

Just days ago two of the valets had actually paused belowstairs to wonder in awe, and check and see if the other had noticed it as well: something about the corner (just the smallest, barely-there corner of the Earl's eye) that brought to mind...one could hardly articulate it to the other...something of the Viscount, of Robin Oxley (may he rest in peace) who had more than made his mark (and had so relished the making of it) in his day at The Tripp Club, at which one of them had priorly been employed. _How could this be possible? A man, who in his son's life had so rarely (if ever) resembled him, suddenly and surprisingly taking on a mischievous glint? A crinkle of impish mirth where neither crinkling, nor imps, nor mirth had yet occurred before?_

The Earl read his piece of mail without the slightest awareness of the stir he was causing among his peers, men so unused to being stirred.

It was from Lady Sophie Miller. "_It has been proposed that we ask your permission to plant a wintertime victory garden in among the flower beds of Kirk Leaves' conservatory. As you know better than do we, the warm water pipes buried in the floor and walls will prevent any freeze from robbing us of our harvest. As for the worthwhile nature of the venture, we shall reap the delicious rewards of our labor, and learn something of Science along the way. However, I have been quite strict with the children that we must not begin the task without your permission, and, we do hope, your attendance at the planting. Little Nan is quite decided that you must yourself spade into the first bit of earth._"

He chuckled out loud, entirely unmindful of the fact that he was in the club's reading room, where noise of any sort (save the ungovernable snores of the eldest members) was forbidden. Truly, he could not have enjoyed any snippet of financial news any better.

_Bravo_, he thought, _Bravo, Lady Sophie_. Really, her tenacity and dedication to the children that he had agreed to take in at Kirk Leaves in the wake of the Blitz and other reasons of wartime displacement (several there had been evacuated from the now-Occupied Channel Islands) left him surprised and (and this he had not felt in a very long time) quite pleased.

He had always known Lady Sophie to be of a kindly bent, and more involved with the raising of her son, Mitch, than most women of her station, who left such tasks up to nannies and nurses. But her handling of the child tenants at Kirk Leaves had left the Earl convinced that, again, excepting her elevated station in life, she would have made a remarkably fine school mistress.

In the beginning of his decision to accept displaced English children and house them at Kirk Leaves, he had agreed only to take in boys (it seemed to him best, he had some level of familiarity with boys), and four at most.

But it had been no more than a week later that Lady Sophie had arrived for a visit, taking him to task over the many still-unused bedrooms (she had, he believed, called them 'legion') and closed-up wings of the manor.

She had given a compelling (for her), if scattered speech on patriotism and brotherhood, and the next thing he knew, seven more boys had arrived, two with several sisters from which they had not wished to be parted. And so, girls, too.

Lady Sophie had visited again. And again. He had begun to fear she was throwing over other meetings on her social calendar to stop in and check on the children. She spoke less and less of who was wearing what, spent less and less time musing on the loss of Mitch, and ways to commemorate his untimely death. Her bustling nature suddenly seemed to have found a meaningful purpose, an entirely unsilly expression.

He could see in her such a craving, such a tender heart for these (at present) parent-less children, confused in new surroundings, some quite alone even when with the group. And as the summer holiday had drawn to a close he had finally given in, and took it upon himself to ask her to oversee the children's education during their time at the manor (however long it might prove).

She had taken to it like a duck to water. The children were not from prominent families. One or two had never lived with indoor plumbing until coming to Kirk Leaves. None had ever known a life with servants, or dressing for dinner. Lady Sophie had enthusiastically insisted on elocution and deportment lessons to go along with the reading and sums.

And now, it would appear, they were to take on gardening produce. (Something he was quite sure Lady Sophie had never attempted before, the only cabbages she would have encountered, cabbage roses, cut for the vase on her drawing room piano.)

He let his mind imagine, for a moment, the conservatory-his wife's beloved retreat-mulchy with radishes, turnips and winter tomatoes in and among some of the (what he was told were) exotic plants so assiduously seen to by Wadlowe and tended by the gardener kept on staff.

Unexpectedly a memory pinched him. His son, his Robin had been seven (close in age to Perry, living at Kirk Leaves now, though Perry was lesser in height). He had been so very proud, pulling his father by the arm into the conservatory, outlining his magnificent plans. A plantation, like those in the Virginia colony, only to be at Kirk Leaves! The boy had taken the Earl's best tobacco and 'planted' it, sprinkling it in rows he had scratched into the loamy soil with a stolen silver shrimp fork.

_Oh, the look on the boy's face_! The Earl had no heart to tell him it would not grow, no more than a planted pound sterling.

He had thanked Robin as effusively as his nature allowed, accepting his young son's admirable intention to supply his father with homegrown pipe tobacco.

He thought about how, even years later, Robin grown, when he, himself walked past that particular patch of soil he would always search with his eye, scouring it for any shoots, any possible evidence that something was growing.

He knew now that it was not tobacco plants he had felt stirring there, growing, it was only another leap forward in the love of his son, (so very much) his wife's child. So like her he had feared not knowing how to raise Robin once she had died...Sir Robert shook his head to clear the cobwebs of memory. _A garden to be planted in his conservatory_. Surely, he must be there, ceremonial spade at the ready. Little Nan was quite right. Now, he must be certain they had at least one good row of tobacco, for luck. He chuckled and patted the pocket of his suit coat, his leather pipe tobacco pouch within. _Yes. Good_.

* * *

**Barnsdale - the uppermost floor - male staff dormitory -** He had never been in service, known a few blokes here and there who had. Most of whom had lost their positions from nipping into their employers' wealth one way or another. Of course, they were no doubt the exception to the rule for those in service. After all, in his pre-war line of work one rarely met a bloke without a bust or two for some mischief or other on his record.

He sat on the narrow iron bed, probably not dissimilar to those in some of the orphanages he'd had the misfortune to bounce between as a young boy. But though the frame was quite utilitarian, the mattress proved well-tended and comfortable, the linens fresh, and (at least in this) he had to give the Nighten family credit for doing right by their employees.

It was a little before one in the morning and yet he still found his mind going back to what there had been of supper. He tried to tell himself it had not been such a monumental occasion, only it had been a long time since he had sat down to...well, in truth, a long time, meaning _never_. There had been _courses_, and the selection of polished silver utensils by his plate seemed to go on forever.

At one point he recalled Marion thanking Fraulein Vaiser for her generous rations' contribution to the spread.

There had, in fact, been a choice for dessert of treacle sponge or apple suet pudding. Ignoring the implied choice, he had taken some of both, sorry to note there was no way to transport such delicate English ambrosia back to the rest of the lads on Sark.

He had wondered if this was always how the 'other half' lived. After all, due to the Occupation they were supposed to be in straitened circumstances (certainly everyone else on the Islands was), but if this were 'straitened circumstances'..._Blimey_, he might consider wedding Gisbonnhoffer, taking on the unwanted daughter of the Kommandant, if it brought one two choices of dessert.

And the damask wallpaper above the handsome chair rail. Well, he certainly had no experience admiring such, but between the dining room's swanky surroundings and the way Sir Edward and Marion had outfitted themselves, dressing especially for the meal (even Fraulein Vaiser in a frock clearly borrowed from Marion's closet), his eyes felt as though they had been on a veritable tour of priceless antiquities and Old Master's paintings at the National Gallery. It had nearly been difficult, in the space of that room (that meal), to recall that not only was it 1943 (and not 1922), but that there was a war going on. And them in the very belly of it.

A knocking at the sleeping room's door broke him away from his reverie.

"Yeah, come," he called, to whichever of the staff needed to speak with him.

The door pushed slightly open, then sprung open all the way, showing the Kommandant's daughter in its frame before she stepped through and pulled the door shut behind her, sealing them both off from the men-only hallway.

"Mind you, Fraulein," Allen said to her, "I don't think they take too kindly here to girls wandering about among the male staff's dormitory. Might not be too safe for you, either."

Her hair was in a braid wrapped around her head several times in the crown-style. The braid was perhaps less severe than it had been earlier in the day when she had first disembarked the German supply ship she had sailed on from France. She still wore the stylish (though not tailored for her) periwinkle frock she had borrowed for dinner. She held her shoes in her hand.

He looked at her with one eyebrow raised, the other uncertain of whether to join it, or further punctuate his curiosity at this surprising turn of events. His mouth (he did not try to curb it) began to curve into an uncertain smile.

"Mr. Allen," she began, her breath somewhat rushed, no doubt from the steep incline of the servants' stair (the only passageway with access to this floor). She took a step closer.

"Dale," he encouraged her, "please." He chose to ignore propriety (she certainly had thrown it out the window by coming up here), and did not stand in her presence, but remained seated on the bed.

"I, there was, that is, a...scarf..."

She threw herself at him with such force that he almost fell back onto the mattress, his hands not free to catch himself.

She had no trouble finding his mouth, nor, surprisingly (or perhaps, not) did she lack passion in the act she had taken upon herself to practice upon his person.

A far cry from his trespass upon Marion before dinner. He purposed early on in the kiss not to dead fish her, whatever her reasons for forcibly snogging him, he was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

He did find it necessary to slow her down a bit, settle her, lest her teeth split his lip, her tongue end up in a knot. But other than that, he let her have her way.

Momentarily she came up for air. Not sure what _she_ thought might be going to happen next, he made certain he was in control of his hands, and that they were removed from any proximity to her person.

"Well," he said, as always with a gift for understatement. "That was unexpected."

She had taken up a seat on the mattress beside him, and had begun to studiously examine her own hands. "I dont want to," she began, not finishing. "That is," she lifted her eyes to his, still managing somehow to look up at him through her lashes in a fetchingly distracting way. "I don't really want to go to bed with you."

"Naw," he agreed, shaking his head, surprised to be charmed by her schizophrenic manner. "Didn't think you did."

Her chin shot up, her eyes turned sharp. "Why not?"

"Well," he teased, "you're just up here to ask about yer scarf, aren't you?"

She did not immediately grasp the teasing. "My scarf? Oh, no. There is no scarf."

"Oh," he commiserated, "No scarf. Well, what brings you to seek me out, then? Our scorching chemistry at dinner? During which you spoke to me not once? Belief that if you distract me you might rob me of my billfold and its very few Reichmarks and scrip?" He grinned at his own cheekiness. "Or are you here to test my loyalty to the Kommandant?"

She scoffed hard at the name. "I am here to convince you to help me escape this island, and return to France."

"Really?" It was his turn to scoff. "And what makes you think I could help you do that?" His mind saw the disappointment in her face. "Oh, yes, so you were throwing yourself at me, offering up your body as a sort of...good-faith payment?"

Her eyes registered a hurt he had not put there. "Am I not pretty enough?"

"How's that?" he asked, "not pretty enough?" He lifted her chin with his hand. "You have, I would have to say, and I pride myself on being honest and fair in such matters, more than the average allotment of pretty."

She brightened. "I am? I do? _Really_?" Her face fell again, "but not to-die-for beautiful. Not like Lady Marion. Men would do anything for her. Don't you think? I mean, you're a man."

He did not scoff at this, nor did he grant it any credence. "And you are yet a girl. How old are you, Ellie," he improvised her a nickname. "Seventeen?"

"Nineteen," she announced with sharp pride, "and soon enough twenty."

"Ah, well, even then, you're not done sweetenin', yet. Hasn't your fiance told you as much? Surely such a lucky man would have written plenteous love notes for you to memorize about how fond he is of your face, the curve of your earlobe? That spot between your brows that telegraphs your thoughts?"

"My fiance?"

"Yes," he recalled to her, "Yanick, the Jewish Communist Resistance fighter the Kommandant is so intent on keeping you away from?"

"Oh," the spot between her brows wrinkled. "I'm not engaged to Yanick."

"No? Well, that's an encouragement, I suppose. A man might not take too kindly to another accepting such 'lip service' from his future bride, even in the case of it being used to grease the wheels of an escape."

"I don't know if he would mind."

"Not the jealous type?"

She shrugged. "I can't say for sure. I don't know him very well."

"Don't know him very well? But you ran away from your school twice to marry him!"

"Well, yes, I did that," she agreed, her words halting. "But I only really met him once, when I found him searching the school's larder for something to steal to eat. He is a _great_ man, Mr. Allen."

"Dale."

"...With important principles of honor and self-sacrifice, love of his fellow man. If I can find him again I _know_ we will be together. We are made for each other."

He half-chuckled. "Look, Hen, I have no way to get off this island without your father's approval. Taking you anywhere other than St. Peter Port tomorrow would be risking my life, a risk a bit too high to make-even for fated-to-be not-yet-lovers who met in a convent school larder."

"Do you have a girl?"

"What? Just the one? No."

"I could be your girl, I could go to bed with you."

He exhaled. "Wouldn't change that I value surviving this war more than your romantic happiness." Finally, he stood. "Now, off to your room and bed with you."

What he saw before him was a dangerous (mark his words) _dangerous_ girl standing on the cusp of womanhood whose slightly still-clumsy ways did little to distract a chap from what would obviously sooner rather than later blossom in their place: a woman who would know her own power (no longer having to consult a man's opinion on her looks, her appeal), and, if not soon shown how to curb and appropriately express it (and cultivate other important qualities), would use it (as she had tried tonight) to manipulate and control those (especially men) around her.

In this he saw, very much, how she could be the Kommandant's child; hungry for power and control.

The offer of sex was merely a last-ditch plan, now, tonight, her eyes and demeanor showing transparently to him how worried she was he would go for it, while at the same time being afraid he mightn't. Soon such tactics would graduate into more of a game, a libidinous chess match, and those she might choose to practice it on less kindly than he.

He found he did not care to imagine her growing into such a woman. He found himself rather pleased, actually, that of all places she had been sent _here_, to Lady Marion's estate to live and grow. To sweeten. Surely an acquaintanceship or friendship with Marion, with the woman behind the Nightwatch, could only mend one's course in such matters.

She had stood obediently and moved to the door to leave, as he had directed. Taking her hand off the knob she turned, slightly biting her lower lip. "Kiss me again before I leave?"

"Wot?" Now there, truly, he knew himself to be charmed, such daring to be found among such natural timidity. _Dangerous_, he thought. _Dangerous_. "Wotcher want out of me now?" he asked in jest, "Keys to the Duesenburg?"

"No," she said. "Just the kiss. You kiss good."

"Yes, well, don't think you're massaging my pride, there, you little minx. 'Heard that one before, haven't I?" But he looked at her, there, all but squinching her eyes shut and puckering, and feelings of danger seemed much further away as he thought to himself: '_What would Clark Gable do?_'

And so, he did.

**...TBC...**


	11. Kitchen  FB 1934  Guernsey's States

**Barnsdale kitchens -** Having been delayed upstairs by the unexpected arrival and attentions of Fraulein Vaiser, Allen worried he would miss Marion, and their arranged meeting for the gift of coffee and tobacco from the kitchens. Thankfully, she was still present when he arrived.

Hurriedly, and to the point, he shared the necessary code with her to convey the detention of Mitch.

"But why should I need that," she asked him. "I told you, Geis is to have released him. Today, he promised. He is back at La Salle's already, no doubt."

"S.O.P.," he told her, with a shrug. "'Standard Operating Procedure'. Best not to question it too closely. _I_ try not to. HQ needs to know, anyhow, what has happened." He tried to assuage her questions. "We can code summat tomorrow to share his release." Allen rubbed his hands together as though readying himself for something. "Now, will we be leavin' directly, or would you like to go over it once again for luck?"

"_You_," Marion said with authority, sizing him up and down. "Will be going nowhere."

"Howzat?"

"_You_ are not invited along." She dropped the pitch, but not the intensity of her voice. "We've a house, here, with what may well amount to a spy among us. And she's _looking_ for you. And if you think for one moment after this afternoon I have any intention to being alone with you, anywhere NEAR the Nightwatch..."

He cut her off. "Already found me, actually."

"What?"

He shrugged. "Threw herself at me, bold as brass, she did." He couldn't help but let a little of Gable's rapscallion sneak into his cock-eyed grin.

Dryly Marion surmised, "And am I to suppose that you were more than happy to catch her, once thrown?"

"Easy, there." The tenor of his voice showed he resented the label of easy mark.

"Gracious! Has Robin surrounded himself only with fellows of his same ilk?"

Allen's grin vanished. "Now, _that_ I will not have, _Lady_ Marion. I shall assume it's your injuries talkin'. In the time I've known Robin, that we've all (save Mitch) known Robin, there's been only your name on his lips, no matter how he may have acted for the better of the unit. Which is not to say he hasn't more than had his chances. Why, Abby Rufford only all-but propositioned him just last week..."

Marion's face looked as though he'd popped out of a hidden corner and said 'boo!', so unexpected was this news of Robin's unnecessary fidelity. "Wha-"

With a disruptive sound, the swinging door into the kitchen opened with a rather deliberate motion, and Eva Heindl entered the room. Both Allen and Marion turned toward her. Despite the late hour she was still dressed for the day (as were they), her eyes missing nothing about them, nor the room around her, but her face remaining still in that charming cast of the Vargas girl. The kind of girl most men (most lords of the manor, even) would be far-from-displeased to encounter when raiding the icebox, the liquor cart.

"Eva," began Marion. "It is late for you to be here."

"Mr. Allen," said Eva, turning her gaze to the man she knew in his capacity as the Kommandant's (her frequent paramour's) chauffeur. "Excuse us, please. Let me get Marion returned to bed. The night is quite late, her many hurts and stresses over the last few harrowing days no doubt keeping her up. As I know _you_ would not wish to." Her lips pressed together with concern, but also with a definite air of a kiss-off about them.

Hastily, Allen agreed, and got himself back up the servants' stair to the men's hall, thankful he had already stowed the coffee and tobacco, expertly concealing them upon his person.

* * *

"I have not yet had a chance to thank you," Marion told her friend and former ladies maid.

Eva lightly shook her head. "You need not. I did it for Lord Nighten." Surprisingly, she referenced Marion's mother, her old mistress, "and Lady Miranda. Did he come to know you at dinner?"

Marion reached up to feel at the rough ends of her shorn hair. "He did not seem to." Her eyes strayed everywhere, unsure where to look with the confession. "But he was not uncordial."

"No," said Eva, already knowing that Sir Edward had tolerated the meal well. "I stayed in case I would be called for." She smiled reassuringly, and moved to put her arms about Marion. "It will not last," she told Sir Edward's daughter things Marion already knew. "None of his turnings do. You know that better than us all."

Marion accepted the hug.

"Tomorrow, if you like, we will take the tongs to your bob," Eva put a kind name on the style, "and reclaim it for fashion."

Marion rolled her eyes ruefully. "Oh, Eva, how many summers, for how many years, did I pout that he would not let me cut it in the style of the day? '_At least to the shoulders_' I would plead with Mother, thinking she could change his mind for me. And now...when it is done, I want nothing so much as to have it back."

"Of course," Eva turned momentarily wise, and with her wisdom, rather wistful, "we want most that which we cannot have back."

"Here," Marion felt the need to bustle, to shake off sad and contemplative thoughts, less they lead to ill-advised secret-sharing. "Let me send you, at least, with some meat and cheese, some of our precious coffee for your mother, your brothers and sisters." She chatted on, "You know, I shouldn't bring it up, but," Marion spoke without her usual restraint, "in your mother's ill-health I was quite surprised to learn upon returning to the island that she had added another to your family."

Seeing through her friend's desire to make herself useful, Eva waved away the gift of foodstuffs, ignoring the impertinent inquiry about her youngest brother, but four years old, born only just before the Occupation. "There is no need. Herr Kommandant more than sees to our brood."

Marion could not conceal her surprise. "Though he has never met them?"

"_Sacre_! _Non_."

Marion's thoughts turned retrospective. "Who would have ever thought, Eva, you and I-romantically linked to two such men."

"Better me than you, I think, _Cherie_," Eva commiserated. "You would not last the afternoon with Herr Vaiser. You would not be content to keep your tongue busy to butter your bread. You would fall, quite quickly, to wagging it in your _own_ head, and then where would you be?" Her words were not quarrelsome, only bemused. "No longer his loose woman, but rather his camp prisoner." In a gesture of familiarity, she reached to tuck Marion's hair behind her left ear. "We must be thankful Herr Geis is less demanding of a pretty face with such a will such as yours behind it."

Marion had not intended to mention it to anyone, the paper that she still had about her person, but in this abbreviated moment with Eva, she felt compelled to show her. To share _something_, though she and Eva, anymore, had devolved into far-more of a surface relationship than they had enjoyed pre-Occupation, when Eva lived in service at Barnsdale, the first person Marion would see on waking, the last before sleep. Now they shared so little, certainly not intimate details of their Jerry lovers. Marion could only guess how far Eva had let herself go with Vaiser, how deep she might be into him for. And what she _could_ guess of that she owed more to understanding Vaiser and what he would require of a woman, what it would take for a woman to become his favorite (as Eva was well-known to be).

And Eva knew not the whole of _her_ story with Geis. For all Marion knew she might think they lived here already as man and wife (enough of Guernsey thought so). She might think, even, that Marion had formed an attachment to him. But there was always an enduring air of goodwill between the two women, of neither side casting stones. They did what they must, and neither took the other to task for it, nor tried to quantify whether her friend had gone too far, broken faith with her own self.

Marion withdrew Geis' telegram from where she had it, and held it out to Eva, whose German emigre grandparents had left her with very well-spoken German to her credit, and passable reading skills in the language.

Eva took the paper in her hands without speaking or asking a question, and read it, her eyes moving efficiently over the birthday greetings from Greta Gisbonnhoffer and children to her husband.

Her eyes raised to meet Marion's, though her head remained bent, and she gestured to Marion to follow her into the smaller (less easily spied upon) larder. Holding the telegram she asked, "do you love him?" She had never asked such a direct question on the subject of Gisbonnhoffer before.

"No," Marion responded, feeling like an over-swollen balloon inside her had mercifully deflated.

Eva re-folded the paper and handed it back to Marion. "Does it matter to you?" The Kommandant, after all, had a current wife back in the Fatherland, possibly other children in addition to Eleri.

Marion's shoulders drew back. "I would have married him, Eva. You know that. I would not have said I would if I did not intend to carry through."

Eva's brows flicked up. Her tone remained smooth and untroubled. "And the now-bearded dead man I spoke with two days ago, out at the windmill? That I gave Master Clem's boat to help affect your rescue?" The air in the larder prickled with electricity at her reference. "You would not have said yes to him if you had not intended to carry through."

"No," Marion whispered, slowly drawing her tongue along the back of her lower teeth. "I would not."

"You cannot marry one dead."

"No."

"You cannot marry a man already a husband."

"No."

"Then I think you will find yourself a spinster," Eva predicted, a furrow to her brow, "soon fallen on hard times, like the rest of the island."

Marion's reply was nearly breathless. "I know."

No explicit advice had been requested, but Eva (ever more insightful, more gifted with discernment where men were concerned) saw clearly that it was in order. "Do not bring this up to him until you are alone."

"Why?" Marion (so not like Eva) questioned. "Shouldn't others _know_ what he clearly planned to dupe me into? Should he not be outed as an unprincipled bounder? Is that word even strong enough for what he had hoped to accomplish?"

"In past times, _oui_." Eva commiserated. "I would call the papers-and the constable-myself. But do not make the mistake of publicly tweaking the nose of a powerful man. What he might tolerate from you, Marion, when alone, and from you in public..." she shook her head slowly. "In this instance they may prove quite dismayingly dissimilar."

Marion took a moment to try and absorb Eva's counsel on the matter. As long as they were being open for the moment about their world, she chanced to ask, "And do you not wish to inquire about Mr. Allen-and the servants' stair-earlier?"

Eva produced a modest put-on sigh. "I am all but exhausted sussing out two men in a single night. Let us save the chauffeur for another tete-a-tete." Her brow grew uncharacteristically forbidding as she warned, "I would have technical difficulties tonight," she did not say where, or in what way, "were I you. I would reference them early on, and cut my signal well before the hour finished. In this way I might attempt to explain my absence over the last several nights." Her eyes held Marion's gaze.

Attempting a blithe reply, Marion lifted her own tone to match that of a happy hostess. "Will you stay the night on the trundle? Can your mother do without you? I would offer Mother's suite, only-Fraulein Vaiser."

"Thank you," said Eva, not minding that she had received no concrete reply to her warning suggestion, and kissing each of her friend's cheeks for luck as Marion stepped out to the Nightwatch.

* * *

It was some time later (not too too much later) that Allen Dale was once again in the kitchens, post-shower, nosing about, determined to find what he expected to be the illegal wireless set of the Barnsdale estate.

Truly, he wished to hear the Nightwatch. To assure himself Marion would get the necessary code fitted into the night's transmission. His mind would not let him accept that in an estate of this size there was no contraband left to be discovered. _It was Marion's house, after all. If she wasn't living a double-life, stowing smuggled or outlawed devices behind the risers of her steps, among the canned goods, the racks of wine in the cellars, well, then who could you depend on?_

He had been going about his business quietly enough when he heard footfalls above his head. Heavy, they were clearly male, and of someone with a right to be where they were: they were far too deliberate to be those of another someone sneaking around.

He let the cellar door creak slightly open, faked an ineffectual whisper, calling the name of one of the scullery maids he knew had taken a shine to him. Hearing nothing, he called her name a second time, as though he were one-half of a planned rendezvous.

"Mr. Allen," he heard Gisbonnhoffer's voice, bored, instructive. "You may come out. Gladys is not here, as you are expecting her to be."

"Wot?" Allen popped up the last stair and into the kitchen pretending at annoyance. "She has played _me_ for the fool the last time, I'll tell you that. A man doesn't mind losing sleep for a little summat worthwhile, but jigger me if she didn't stand me up again."

Gisbonnhoffer was standing near the butcher block, cutting bread and cheese for himself. His back was to Allen. He ignored the chauffeur's verbosity where his anticipated peccadilloes were concerned. Geis' tone and manner were drier than usual, less conversational, if possible. Though he spoke to Allen, he did not turn to face him. "The Kommandant had you bring the Lady Marion home?"

"Yes."

The officer turned only his head to see Allen's face. "And he has installed his daughter here, also, in _my_ house?"

"Seems like."

"How does she fare?"

This time, Allen did an admirable job of submerging his previous grin under an impenetrable facade of casual disinterest. "Fraulein Vaiser has taken rather a forceful liking to the place, I would say, Sir."

Gisbonnhoffer let the knife slice hard through the bread, and into the butcher block, the sound of his simmering disgust a loud 'chop' on the wood. "I meant, _of course_, Lady Marion."

He turned, and again he was only a back for Allen to speak to.

Once more, lackadaisical indifference. "Right. She is tired, and mending. She did come down for dinner, but I daresay no one has heard from her, nor troubled her since shortly after that time. Kommandant's engaged her to travel to St. Peter Port tommor-_today_, and chaperone his daughter while at the shops."

Gisbonnhoffer swore, his jaw immediately tense with unexpressed irritation. "That is not what she needs."

"Sir."

"Get to your bed, Driver," he sneered, though he had no particular authority over Allen, the _Kommandant's_ driver, save that he was a German, and Allen was not. "I shall soon enough take to mine. We each have our duties, though I cannot be made to understand why an injured woman must be expected to hew so closely to hers."

* * *

**Alderney - Treeton Camp -** If he could close his eyes-if he could keep them shut-the room (_intra muros_) would not be there any longer. The space would cease to be sensed by him, and therefore (_ergo_) as an inevitable result (_ipso facto_), it would no longer exist. He would not be here, he would be instead, _in statu quo ante bellum_.

**London, 1934 -** They had already been so very drunk. Drunk as lords, so the saying went, though they were neither yet lords, though destined one day to be so.

It was meant to have been a celebration, commencement at last from university, and in the wake of _his_ accomplishing such, Mitch's finally being cemented as his uncle's, Lord Bonchurch's, legal heir.

Tish had been with them, and Constance Brace-Bingington, without whom Tish never seemed to go anywhere. Beatrice Something-or-other, and the very pretty, game-for-anything Joan Throckmorton. Always four, was Robin's preference. Four better than three, three better than two. Best insurance (he claimed) against getting bored with any one girl. Even numbers to keep from anyone feeling too left out.

The bottle (the most-recent bottle, that was) had proven in possession of a decidedly stubborn cork-or had it been, just, a particularly uncoordinated (at that hour, at that level of intoxication) set of fingers?

Anticipating its imminent popping, Robin had already moved on to requesting slippers from the girls, ready for his share of the bubbly.

Mitch had looked at Constance (his eyes actually wishing to look to Tish, though hers seemed to settle more than he would have liked to realize on Robin's unnoticing ones), thinking he saw an opportunity to impress her.

He opened the automobile's door that they had all so recently slid out, and he presented the recalcitrant bottle to Robin.

"My dear Viscount," Mitch mimed as though they were christening a ship, "the horror (_hick_), I believe, rather, that is to say...the honor is (_hick_) all yours!"

Understanding his intent, Robin had held the bottleneck down to the doorjamb, and Mitch shouted, "in the name of His Maj-(_hick_)esty!" with a pickled grin and a triumphant slam.

A very unpleasant commotion ensued. Tish began shouting (more outraged than terrified) that there was blood on her evening gown. Beatrice Something-or-other began to weep inconsolably. Joan had fallen asleep, and woke not even for the chaotic din, and Constance began to tipsily (and inaccurately) recite Lady MacBeth's 'out damned spot'.

Robin swore quite colorfully, without a thought to the girls, no longer any trace of floating off to happyland about him, and Mitch began to fear that, though Robin's finger was obviously broken-the tendon in it likely severed by the jagged glass (all that was left of the shattered bottleneck)-_he_ was about to be punched in the face.

"I only hope," Robin had said, hexing him through clenched teeth as Mitch (cold with the abruptly sobering violence) drove them like lightning to the nearest surgery, "that you will someday feel my pain, _Brute_."

* * *

Mitch found he needed an emotion that was not despair, one that was not exactly hope (of which there felt little when in the grip of the machine), nor peace. He suckled on the memory, brought his mind to recall that when Robin had put a curse on him so, he had, at the time, been cradled in the lap of one Tish Lavely, who had, with shocking speed, gotten over the indignity of the future Earl of Huntingdon's bodily fluids ruining her attire.

Her lacquered fingernails combing through Robin's hair, stroking at his temple. Attempting to soothe, to give succor. Well, Mitch had seen Robin take far worse (though generally not due to his own blunder), and live through it _quite_ well without a spot in a woman's lap. Much less the lap of one Tish.

Mitch gnawed on his remembrance of that night like a dog on a bone, wishing there were more meat left clinging to it. He stoked the fire of anger, of hatred, of the green jealousy that can so often and so easily turn red between men. He let it pressurize inside him until he could not hardly be contained by the German's restraints, such was his rage, his readiness to physically attack the man that had wronged him so.

_Fury_, Mitch thought, _this is the thing. Not patience, not belief in oneself, not 'King and Country'. No, this is what would carry him through. Staying alive to give Robin what he had coming_.

* * *

**Barnsdale -** Sometime after the Kommandant's driver had (at his order) retired, Gisbonnhoffer wandered about the grand stone house, always surprised by some new knick-knack, some detail in a painting, some whatnot in a display case that he had never before noticed.

Mostly aimless in his indoor ramble, he did find himself after a time gravitating toward the main stair, the balustrade open on the second level to the bed chambers, a second-floor sitting room directly at the head of the stair, the bedrooms behind the railings, men's to one half-hall, women's to the other. He came to the door that was Marion's without much conscious thought. He had always wondered why she had never moved herself into her mother's larger, more elegant suite after the Occupation, after it would have been clear her mother was not to be arriving for a visit. Certainly such a space would suit, and would have housed them both more than comfortably. The larger bedstead would have easily accommodated his height.

And now she had lost access to it, with the enforced addition of Vaiser's unexpected brat. And so there was yet another person to come between Marion and him, in addition to Edward. To interrupt their meals, invade their evening privacy, to interpose themselves, stealing Marion's conversations, attentions and intimacies that he wished to be only his.

He leaned his forehead into the wooden door, beyond which she slept after nights of captivity, once again in relative safety.

Safety which he provided her. A home, a standard of living which he saw to it she was able to maintain. Her comfort, her welfare, the sheets she slept on, the clothes she wore, the books her witless father read, the food she ate and the fires in each hearth to chase away cold: all of it his. All of it his gift to her. Elsewhere on the Islands he knew, he heard...stories of books burned to keep warm, flower bulbs ground to some approximation of flour for cooking, little access if any to medical care, men growing slowly half-crazed with lack. Not so here, at Barnsdale. Not as long as he, Geis Gisbonnhoffer, born a nobody, not even first son of a nobody, no money to travel Europe, none to send him to the English university that had accepted him for his studies... Not as long as Geis Gisbonnhoffer was lord of Barnsdale.

He brought his hand up to the wood near his face, palming it as though he might be able to feel her breathing through the door.

Ever something coming between them. The flier escaping with her, the Kommandant issuing him orders to return to his post, her being long gone when he had returned to the Harbormaster's office to find her, and now, this door.

He might well have been awake at such a late hour merely from pent-up thoughts of frustration had he not long ago in the Occupation trained himself to rise each night to listen to and track the Nightwatch, a fruitless habit now, as the Kommandant's Driver had informed him she was caught and executed.

And now, coming between Marion and him, her injuries. Her loss of faith in his protection of her. He recalled the fisherman. He had promised her he would release the man. He recalled that, now, too late to do anything about it. Still, what could an overnight in the holding cell do to him? Little harm. The man would likely be warmer than back in his shack on Sark. He assured himself. He had ordered Specialist Joseph to stay away unless called for. He would return tomorrow and release him, then. A day late, but as good as a promise kept.

_Tomorrow_. His time away from his post anymore was always painfully brief, the Kommandant liking him installed at the Treeton Camp. It would disappoint Vaiser, no doubt, once he and Marion were wed. He had no intention of bringing her to live on an island of prisons, nor of taking her from this place. Nor did he plan on being away from her for weeks at a time. The Kommandant would simply have to understand.

He rolled his head to bring the flat of his cheek in touch with the door, as though it held some warmth, some approximation of the living woman behind its knob and hinges.

He stopped himself short of saying her name, lest his sigh be louder than he thought and it wake her from her needed rest.

It would not be long until he would see her, not long until dawn, until breakfast, until they could speak.

He stepped away from the door, heading toward his own room where he knew sleep would not come easily, and he would have several hours yet of lying on his back tracing imagined shapes in the plaster of the ceiling.

* * *

**October 18th - Guernsey - The States -** The Bailiff had trouble concentrating in the morning's session. He was wrestling with what to do. What action to take, if any. Whether to contact Alderney's Island Kommandant, Vaiser, and request _his_ assistance in the matter.

Nothing like this had ever happened before in his administration. He looked again at the piece of mail that had arrived, so ominously, in the morning's post. He cracked open the binder in front of him, just enough to see the leg of one in the string of paper dolls, cut so as to be chained together at the hands, their unmistakable skirts each listing the name of a Guernseywoman executed over the last week in Vaiser's hunt for the Nightwatch.

Of course, Jodderick did not need their names printed out for him in a sort of jester's scrawl. They had been playing like a stuck record in his mind since the list of them had been handed to him by Vaiser, who expected _him_ to notify the families of their unexpected (and entirely undeserved) bereavements.

It was all Jodderick could do to now refrain from repeating them out loud, disrupting the session, chanting them like some twisted rosary as he shouted his _peccavi_ for all to hear. But this sin, this mortal transgression wasn't his, surely. What could _he_ have done to stop it?

He tried, he _tried_ in his position to protect the Islands, to protect those among his bailiwick from their oppressors. It was Vaiser who had given the order. Vaiser's doing. It was _he_ who should have received the paper doll chain of victims, the accompanying note that cryptically taunted, "_Whichman watches you_".

_Yes_, perhaps he would attempt to contact Gisbonnhoffer. There might yet be some goodwill left there. After all, hadn't he had introduced the lieutenant to his fiancee? Perhaps Gisbonnhoffer might be able to convince Vaiser to take a public stance that he, Jodderick, had no part in the matter. Something, anything to make his attache, poor Matthew, less ill-at-ease when opening the mail.

**...TBC...**

* * *

_Technical note:_ When I code this for ffnet into HTML, there are certain inherent hiccups, for example, it takes my double dashes(-) and converts them-oh, it probably just did-into single ones.  
Also, it rejects/leaves out any letter with an accent on it such as fiancee or tete-a-tete or the special accent on the 'c' in facade.  
This segment seemed to have more than the usual amount of such words, so if I've missed fixing one (and instead of facade you are getting faade, or fianc instead of fiancee) please do PM me. I do like my work (at a bare minimum) to be clean and well-pressed. _Thanks!_


	12. Day dreams and Nightmares

**GUERNSEY -** Eva Heindl woke slowly, her mind cataloging sensory information to inform her of where she was before she opened her eyes.

As a rule, Kommandant Vaiser slept little, and that rarely away from the fortress of his commandeered estate on Alderney. And so when she was with him, she, also, slept little-if at all. The mere fact that she knew herself to be waking from a restful night-into-late-mid-morning informed her that she was not in his presence.

A small flex of her back told her she was alone at the moment, no small brothers, no growing-gangly sisters sharing a crowded mattress with her, as they would have at home.

No smells from a smoking cottage _cuisaenne_ fire, no varying sounds of others breathing. No sharp (always sharp, staccato) poke from seventeen-year-old Daniel to wake her and set her (along with the others) about her work for the day.

The linens, the light touch of lavender liked by Lady Nighten on the bedclothes, still employed even after her long absence: it was Barnsdale. But certainly not her old room in the women servants' dormitory hall. Too much sunlight for that. Sunlight, intoxicating in its warmth, like a thick fragrance that one might smell if only one worked hard enough to do so, strained and breathed in at just the right moment.

But it was illusion. The sun had no discernable scent, no true caress. She had only forgotten to pull closed the blackout curtains last night in Lady Marion's room, where she occupied the low trundle.

_How long since she had slept at Barnsdale?_

It had been years. The occupying Germans had 'liberated' her from her post in service here with their Summer of '40 arrival, due to her family's German strong heritage. She had only shortly been returned to the Nighten staff at the time, coming back to work only with Lady Marion's unexpected arrival back on the island that March to look after the injured Sir Edward.

The previous year neither Marion nor Lady Nighten had come for holiday. Lady Nighten because the divorce had become final in the courts. Marion because she was abroad. It had been only Sir Edward and Master Clem, come down from London.

And it had been that lazy holiday of May '39, boat-building near the secluded inlet on the Barnsdale holding that had led to her being tumbled, repeatedly tumbled, into a cliche. The maid, _inamorata_ to the lord's son.

She thought of (tried to recall, anyway) those days; light, clean, airy and heady with pollen, all Guernsey _en haut_ bloom, fecund with possibilities.

Not knowing he (or anyone) was nearby, Eva had walked down to the inlet to fetch back water to the cottage for washing. Without a lady at Barnsdale, she had not been required to work (nor to draw a wage), and so she did what she could to help at home, her overtaxed mother's health not being what it had once been.

She walked, as was her girlish preference at the time, barefoot toward the bank of the deep-enough-to-support-a-vessel _iaoue_ on its way out to the sea, pushing back vines and green-with-life branches that caught on her hair and skirt. No doubt she had looked of nothing so much as a country peasant girl, backward and unsophisticated to his cultured and educated eye.

It had been several summer holidays since she had seen him-since he had seen her, his work in England keeping him busy and unable to get away.

Her mother (who believed in all manner of numerology and fairy stories, potions for _bounheur_, luck or healing) had always wagged a finger and told Eva she had been drawn there that day-never mind trying to talk her out of it-something deep and primal had called out to her daughter to fetch water from _just_ that spot, at _just_ that time.

Eva had not bothered to ask if that same primeval urging had kept her from wearing shoes, as well. It was the lack of shoes that seemed to have first caught his eye, her foot taking a cut from some harsh-growing gorse.

It was his looking at her, from where he stood planing lumber for his coming-on boat that had distracted her as she put her foot down to wash the streak of blood away in the fast-moving stream.

He winked, and it was as if the force of the cheeky gesture traveled to her across the open space between them, through the hanging vines and leafy branches like a ripple in a puddle, and physically knocked her over. She fell into the stream's shallows, wet all-over, her simple peasant skirt already tucked up into a belt to ease walking through high grass, now soaked, and three times as heavy.

She had never been in any danger of being swept away, though the stream was fast-running, but still, in his athleticism, he quickly covered the distance to her to offer a hand up and out.

Laying in Marion's trundle, Eva thought about that hand, about her acceptance of it. Large and commanding, the hand of a man used to getting his way, used to swaying any opposition to his way of thinking easily, without much trouble. Commanding, but sympathetic, the grip infused with just the right amount of pressure, of reassurance, when taking a woman's, a lady's. In her memory it had become so much more than a simple gesture of courtesy. And it had begun something as yet unfinished these years later.

In his labor on the boat, Clem had not removed his shirt, but wore it, for the most part unbuttoned, casual braces holding up his workmen's trousers.

She recalled a sort of shock, a sort of shiver at seeing him so, attired so much like an average Islander. In the sunlight the blue of his eyes (not so similar to Marion's as to be unsettling) seemed to glint like glass until it had become at times almost hard to hold his gaze.

His laugh in the open was easier than it had been among the drawing rooms at the estate, less pitched for properness. His hand, which she would never have encountered in her duties, much less the strength of his arm, his embrace, felt invigorating, unexpected, like a particularly brilliant sunset.

"Come, Eva," he had chuckled in a deep, jolly way, "we must get you home."

"I do not think, Master Clem," she replied, more saucily than she was generally used to speaking, "a dousing in water would be seen as such a great emergency, there."

She had not immediately realized her unexpected dip had not only left her skirts clinging about her legs and her peeking-out-above-her-knees thighs, but that the water had climbed well up the side of her bosom, damply outlining the lower half-circles of those well-proportioned curves.

Clem _had_ seen. And he looked at her in a way she had noticed local men do of late, but she did not respond to his glance as she would have to theirs. Something inside herself that she had not yet fully understood told her _not_ to toss her head in reply, but rather to lower it, returning his look through her eyelashes. In uncertainty, she gave a tentative tug with her teeth on her lower lip. Her right hand went self-consciously to smoothing her half-wet hair.

This won her the smile of his obvious satisfaction with what he saw. "Then let us have luncheon," he declared, "and let the sun see to your drying off. _Attends_," he bragged, producing bread and cheese, a small bottle of local wine, "I shall make it for you, while you sit idle as the lady of the house."

They had both laughed at this, his pretending to serve her after her years of service to his family.

There had been little they had not spoken of that _r'levaie_, nor on the days to come, her daily trips to bring water back to her family's cottage as regular as his visits to work further on his (now very slowly progressing) boat. Save one topic: they never had discussed or acknowledged the dangerous undertow they both felt swept into by the other.

He, as the elder, no doubt understood it better than her. He had been a man for some years, not just anywhere, but London; a man of the world and of its pleasures. She had only just fully stepped from girl into young woman, but an Islander girl, rural, inexperienced, willingly helpless when Sir Edward's son, the man she had respected, the man whose mother (who thought highly of her son) she had intimately served for many years, took it into his head that day to pursue her. Had she understood the concept, then, 'flattered' would have been too shallow a term for her urgently instinctual response to his attentions.

And though they had not spoken of the chemical reaction that day seemed to have initiated, it was not long before their summer-tanned skins did any necessary communicating and communing on the matter there, in easy sight of the watercraft's abandoned hull, among the tall grass.

She tried to recall details of their physical intimacy. He had never been harsh with her, never selfish. _But had it been satisfying? Had it been emotionally intimate?_

Certainly it had been frequent enough that summer. One might even say, robust, but of course that was a word one might often apply to Clem Nighten in any task to which he set his mind and his considerable charisma. There was no reason why his tumbling her should have proven any different.

But her memory of their carnal embrace was cobwebby, clouded with inexact recollections when it came down to it. Like a past shrouded in mist, about which one could sing melancholericly, but about which one had trouble locating substantial reminiscences of.

_Had she loved him?_ For a summer, certainly. No doubt well into the autumn, after he had returned to London, to his life. To _his_ world. Her world, a holiday to him.

_Was their story ended? Their affaire-de-coeur fini?_ To that, as ever, she could but answer a resounding, '_nennin_.'.

"_Dame_," she called, not too loudly, to the mattress above her as she stirred to meet the day. "_Dame_. Marion!"

* * *

Marion lay in her bed, that familiar, (in days past, comforting) spot at Barnsdale, so little altered of what there was about her since the carefree holidays of her childhood, her young adulthood, even in the wake of the Occupation.

She let her mind skip over the stash of liquor in her armoire, like a needle on a scratched record, to slip past that knowledge like a song she didnt care to hear at the moment, a sad, slow song, when she was instead in the mood for a foxtrot, a Gene Krupa drum solo.

She was, in that moment, hanging, suspended mid-waking, mid-sleeping, in that tenuous place where what is dream and what is reality mix and simmer with strange interactions.

Her mind, all night, had never yet let go of a song she had chosen to play on the truncated Nightwatch, not entirely sure why she had picked it.

It had been for Flight Commander Thomas Carter, and his secret daughter, Zara, in response to a feeling she had gotten from him, an intangible sensation. The Helen Forrest vocal for Artie Shaw's orchestra that she had on record was, of course, not about the love of a father for his child, but, something told her it applied to Carter nonetheless. "_Come a rainstorm, put your rubbers on your feet/Comes a snowstorm, you can get a little heat/Comes love? Nothing can be done/Don't try hidin', 'cause there isn't any use/You'll start slidin' when your heart turns on the juice_."

Of course, there was no way to dedicate it; no smart way. And so, as much as she had played it for them, this father and daughter who had never met, she played it for herself, and perhaps for Edward, too. Love for him had brought her here, had kept her here these years until... "_Comes a headache, you can lose it in a day/Comes a toothache, see the dentist right away/Comes love? Nothing can be done!_"

Rolling to her back, Marion fell into memory of the night before, of Allen Dale catching her out in the park as she tried to sneak back to her room upon returning from the Nightwatch.

She had gotten in a good swing, thinking he was up to his tricks of earlier in the day, but surprise was again on his side, and he cleanly ducked, declaring he was only there to warn her Geis had arrived at the estate, and was still up and about.

She had mumbled an apology, half-heartedly. It would have felt quite good, actually, to clock Robin's man's jaw.

At this news, she increased her attempt at stealth upon entering the house, using (though warily) the servants' stair to the second floor. Arriving there, she cracked its door open, only to spy Geis leaning his head into her bedchamber door. Her heart pounded wildly as she tried to think of some explanation that in her post-kidnapping condition she would be (rather than in her bed) wandering the house fully dressed at three in the morning. Fortunately, he did not tarry long in that position, and finally moved on to his own (Clem's) room.

As soon as she was sure he was well-inside, she walked as soundlessly as possible to her door, hand to the knob, when she was startled by another person in the corridor. Eleri Vaiser.

"Lady Marion?" Eleri called in a curious whisper.

"Eleri," Marion put on her best imitation of a disapproving nun as the girl approached her. "It is very late, and unseemly that you are not in your bed."

"I thought I heard something, someone saying your name."

Marion decided to go with the truth. "It is Herr Geis. He has arrived at the estate."

Eleri's eyes grew large with the possibility of having stumbled onto a romantic interlude. "So you were speaking to him?"

"No, Eleri," she didn't need this girl thinking she was up to no good in the wee smalls. "I was _asleep_."

"Oh," said Fraulein Vaiser, confused by the disharmony between Marion's statement and her obvious attire. "Is it the custom, then, for the English to sleep in their clothes?" A mark of puzzlement crept onto the girl's brow.

Marion sighed. "You are sleepy, Eleri, your eyes play tricks on you. Now please, retire until morning."

"Yes, Lady Marion."

"And Eleri?"

"Yes, Ma'am?"

"I spoke to the chauffeur."

She did not have to see Eleri's face to note the frozen moment in the girl's shoulders, her back to Marion where she had been returning to her bed.

Marion allowed the seconds to pass, deliberately letting the girl swim in the potential turmoil of Marion knowing what she had been up to in the male servants' hall. Marion took a breath. "He does not know where your scarf is."

"_Yes_, my lady."

Marion's half-slumbering mind slipped away from reminiscence and into the imagination of conjecture, locating her again in her bed, only now it appeared to be early evening, the setting sun framed by the pulled-back black-out curtains.

She looked to the comfy bedside chair she had once found Robin in, only to see Fred Otto sitting there, rolling himself a cigarette.

"Freddy?" she asked, trying to think of how to politely ask him what he was doing there. Like the flick of a match being lit, her brain blazed for a moment with the image of Robin, the night of her engagement party, draped over the stone bench at the hedge maze's center, that feeling of being gut-punched when seeing something you knew was technically impossible: the dead man you loved alive, now present, before you.

Seeing Fred in that chair was not as sizeable a punch, not as stunning a blow, but the base sensation was similar.

Fred smiled at her, slowly and companionably, as was his way, standing up from the chair to kiss her forehead. She smiled at the salutation, though somewhat uncomfortably, not understanding how it was Fred could be here.

"Easy now, there, Fred-O," she heard, only to see Allen Dale rise from the stool at her vanity and approach her bed. He was no longer in his chauffeur's uniform coat, but still in its trousers, wide at the thighs, jodhpur-like and black. He wore only a sleeveless undershirt, and was already smoking a cigarette, down now to but a stub.

He approached her on the bed, and she watched herself, quite horrified, allow him to slide his left hand underneath her hair to the back of her neck (no injury there in this dream-state), at which she tilted back her head and accepted his kiss. Her confused, horrified mind tried to protest with words, but he had already stepped back toward the windows.

At a sound of water she turned to look toward the bath door, only to see Thomas Carter step from the tub still in his tattered RAF gear, cumbersome deployed parachute strapped to his back, saturated with water, as was he, drenched. He walked toward the bed, dragging the chute behind him like Dickens' Marley dragged his chains.

He put one knee into the mattress, plopping the waterlogged chute onto her duvet. She leaned away from him before he, too, could claim a kiss, but his hand was too fast for her, and he had hers in it and to his lips just as she turned to her right, trying desperately to find a direction to look that did not hold another unwelcome trespasser.

To her right, propped up on a single elbow, shirtless under the bed's top sheet, was Geis, his fingers stroking her right arm as a lover might absentmindedly (or pre-amorously) do.

He had not to lift himself up very far to meet with her neck, which he took possession of with his lips, until his kisses began to descend.

It was then she noticed she had no clothes on, even, to come between him and her. She was bare as a Renaissance-rendered Eve, her hair (no longer shorn as by Carter) hanging for the moment conveniently shrouding each breast, her hips below unfamiliar, almost hoop-like, round and symbolic with fertility. Her mind shouted at herself to get free of the bed, of the four men who did not belong in her room. She looked to the door that led to the corridor, the main stair beyond.

It burst open, and Robin stood framed within it, not yet inside the room, machine gun in his hand. He was in full-combat gear, down to his helmet, dirty with mud, salt sea and Dunkirk sand, and he looked as though he no longer quite had the power to keep himself upright.

He looked at her, his eyes inhumanly blue in contrast to the brown of his gear and its grit, and she wanted to shout, to tell him this was not what it seemed.

Immediately to the rear of him appeared a flock of newspaper reporters and photographers snapping photos and shouting questions at her, at Robin, whom they addressed as the Viscount.

Geis continued to kiss her, his mouth traveling ever lower, Carter again saluted her hand with his lips, Allen looked as though he would step toward the bed again to repeat his transgression, and Fred smiled as his tongue flicked out to seal the rolling paper on his smoke.

And in the last corner she had to look, the last place left to probe for hope, for rescue from this terrifying place, from which she could not move, the Kommandant stood, casually propped against the wall. Upon catching her eye he leered for a moment, clearly enjoying the view. Then he raised his left hand, still a good distance away from her bed, and blew her a kiss.

Marion screamed.

"_Dame_," she heard, not too loudly, from the mattress below. "_Dame_ Marion!"

"Eva, Eva," she cried in knee-jerk response to the familiar voice as she came out of the nightmare. "Did I scream? Did I call out?"

"No, Marion, no. You have said nothing," Eva told her, now on her knees on the trundle to bring herself in sight of the mattress above. "Made no sound. What it is?"

"Do you think," Marion asked, unable to relate the dream, unwilling to try, "do you think we are responsible for our dreams?"

"No, I am sure not. _Mere_ would say we may not be responsible for what we dream, but that our dreams will tell us who we are on the path to becoming." Seeing the dark cast of Marion's eyes at this pronouncement, she rushed to temper it, "but of course, _Mere_ sees omens everywhere."

Marion let several moments pass as her heart settled before responding. "Yes," she agreed, thankful for the less-dire turn of conversation, "and Mr. Clun always credited her with divining the best days for garden parties. And she has always faultlessly predicted when the horses will foal, or new babes in the village make their debuts."

Eva smiled. "I will tell her that you think so well of her talent," she replied. "Thank you for inviting me to a bed last night."

"Of course. I would have done so without regard to your being out past the early curfew."

"The Kommandant's chauffeur could have driven me, likely with impunity, three-quarters of the way home."

"Yes," Marion half-scoffed, "the Kommandant's chauffeur. I suppose now I must say something in regard to him."

Eva's face showed her attentiveness in the matter. "_Oui_?"

"Let us say he has the lips of a scoundrel..."

"And the smile of a rogue..."

"Put together they are like as not to cause both him, and us, future trouble."

Eva cocked her head to ask, "Fraulein Vaiser?"

"Can you suss her so easily?"

"Let us say that if I were her age, and the Kommandant's driver who he is...it would seem a natural coupling, though perhaps not a lasting one." Eva paused for a moment and added, "but I have also seen him perform small acts of kindness when he believes no one is looking. Judge him for his improper treatment of you in the stairwell," she lightly shook her head, "but no further than that. Like many islanders anymore, I believe there is more to him than may easily be seen."

At this, Marion chose not to comment, Eva's perception spooking her momentarily. Her expression grew unintentionally furtive, studious, even.

"Something has changed," Eva intuited, her brows constricting, Marion seeming before her eyes to become more burdened, even, than the night before in the larder.

"Herr Geis has returned."

Eva moved into action. "Then we must hurry with the curling tongs, and ring down for breakfast."

"No," declared Marion, wearily. "Not right away." Her face had taken on a level of resolve, and with it, a queerish, infrequently seen peace-not the simple study in placidness she had worn for the years of the Occupation like a hat's netting veil, partially concealing what lay behind it.

She looked at Eva. "I am _sick_," she said in non-sequitur, the words on her tongue bitter as horseradish, causing a similar tearing in her eyes, "of never doing the right thing."

Nonetheless, Eva opened the door to the bath, engaged the taps in the tub, and set towels and soaps at the ready for her one-time mistress.

* * *

**ALDERNEY -** _Agony. Of the Specialist Joseph variety._

Mitch thought of the Guernsey families, the names of which he had not always known. Thought of their faces when they had spied the offerings of potatoes, on rare occasions bread, and on rarer, flour sacks, on their doorsteps.

Sometimes it would be a young child, reacting as though Father Christmas had only just missed placing the anonymously-given benevolent gifts of Unit 1192 in their stockings. Sometimes a mother, clutching still-dirty vegetables reverently, as though they were Holy Communion wafers, prayers streaming from her lips like the tears from her eyes. Or the man of the house, warily scanning the tree line, the horizon, uncertain whether to trust such unexpected bounty.

What he tried NOT to think of were Black Market contacts, local Resistance leaders, and, always, England. England must stay buried, at any cost.

If he was to be exposed as Resistance, the line of that had to stop with the Islands. It must not reach across the Channel. It must not implicate his fellows.

In devising a stratagem they had all agreed: once found out they had at least two weeks' freedom left; at most, two months before the Jerries would likely have them to the last man, their lives, their modified mission of disrupting and spying on the enemy, over. It would be La Coupee for the unit. One final, far-from glorious (if one embraced living as more glorious than death) last stand.

_No, don't think about the gang_. Don't think about their faces. _Don't_. Think instead of the dark feathers of cormorants mounting on the Atlantic wind into a pale morning sky. Of woodlands scented with wild garlic, and briar rose. Think of home. Of Sark.

_Think_. You were born a Guernseyman. A simple fellow. Your home, your boat, is on Sark. Sark is where you wish to return. Casting a rod from the rocks to hook bass, bream, red and grey mullet. Think of the honeysuckle coating the countryside. _Lonicera japonica_.

Honeysuckle, for inconstancy.

_Heavens, no! Don't think, for goodness sake, don't think of inconstancy_.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** To date I have had Eva speaking occasional words of French. (She is far more French/Norman as an Islander than the German her actual physical heritage implies.) Herein, she has begun using D'guernesiais/Guernsey French. So...  
_cuisaenne_ - kitchen, _iaoue_ - water, _bounheur_ - luck/good fortune, _r'levaie_ - afternoon, _nennin_ - no 


	13. Grey Goose Club ShopTrip Note on Ranks

**LONDON - Grey Goose Gentlemen's Club -** The major domo had never seen a man of such height in all his forty-five years in service to the Grey Goose. Well-bred English noblemen simply weren't grown to such a height, such a breadth of chest. It seemed, somehow, in poor taste.

This non-member had actually had to significantly _bow_ his head to avoid the street-level entrance transom. _Well_-over six foot four, if he was an inch. One felt pity for his tailor, for surely such a man _had_ to employ a tailor. Indubitably the shops, even as varied and numerous as those in London, could not possibly carry such ludicrously sized garments ready-made, as this Philistinian Goliath must require.

The voice, really, was no better, gruff and overly expressive. At moments it seemed given toward a bit, even, of a honk.

The man had chosen to pay his visit to the Club in his uniform, and therefore, in such a time of international turmoil, allowances _must_ be made. Such (_ahem_) gentlemen must be tolerated, and treated courteously.

It came as no surprise that Naval Commander Ron Legg (as he introduced himself, handing over, not even, a card to do so) was here for the Club's (only-recently become) most colorful member, the (once sedate, dependable, _appropriate_) Earl of Huntingdon.

The major domo did his duty, and showed the fellow personally to one of the meeting rooms, sending a footman to alert Sir Robert that his visitor was there. As the giant trailed (surprisingly unclumsily) behind him, through forest after forest of leather chairs and elaborately carved mahogany occasional tables, games of slow chess, seas of opened newspapers obscuring their readers, trays of cigars and legions of perfectly polished, impeccably tied wingtips, Grey Goose's major domo could not have known this hulk of humanity enjoyed regular access to Windsor Castle, and the royal family's Scottish estates. That he was not unfamiliar with the King and Queen at high (and also at far less-formal) tea, nor that solely on account of the war he had resigned his post as head of the Princess Elizabeth's Private Guard.

When the major domo left Naval Commander Legg in the meeting room, its brass library lights needlessly illuminating the bare barrister's table in front of him, he noted the man was actually unbuttoning his uniform coat down to the collared shirt underneath.

He closed his eyes, wishing he had not see it, before he soundlessly pulled the door closed. _Ah, but here came the Earl_. This man (and his clearly savage ways) would be _his_ worry for the moment. With that calming knowledge, the major domo returned immediately to the podium, relieving the valet he had left attending on the street-level door.

* * *

"Sir," the Earl began, once he and his unexpected guest were seated, "I confess, I am not sure why you have sought me out."

"Please," Legg asked, "call me Ron, my lord, or, Legg, if you like. I had thought to write to you, but in the end I have procrastinated and my time is short, so I must beg a face-to-face interview with you."

"Certainly, Mr.-Legg. I find I am at my leisure until nearly three o'clock today. My time is yours entirely. You do seem troubled. I wonder, have we met?"

"No, Sir Robert. We have not, but as I am in His Majesty's service, I have made acquaintances with several gents what know you. Clem Nighten, for instance. He recently shared with me that you have been taking in refugees and displaced children, mostly boys, but that you had also invited his expectant wife to your country estate."

"Yes," the Earl responded mildly, in no rush to hurry the interview along, "that is true."

"Well, Sir," Legg's demeanor became less casual, more intent. "I find myself in a peculiar line of business, now, and my boy Mark will be needing a safe place to stay. He has been with me two years now, just outside London, but my new orders (of which I am not obliged to share about) clearly state that I may be called off at a moment's notice to duty, and as you know my rank is _Naval_ Commander, the particular duty will prove far from London or hereabouts."

The Earl's eyebrows flicked up. "And your Mark has no family?"

"We are all that's left, Sir. Him and me."

The Earl's brow furrowed with the need to ask a probing question. "...And the mother?"

"Oh. Yes, Sir. I did not say. Mark is my nephew. He is not my rightful son, though I have full legal guardianship of him. His mother and father, my brother, were buried in the Blitz." His mouth drew together in a line with the memory. "'Twas only Mark that got out of the rubble of their bombed-out flat."

The Earl replied with appropriate concern to this news. "And how old _is_ he?"

"Ten, my lord."

Sir Robert's heart was touched by the unfortunate circumstance. "And so he was only..."

"Eight. He were eight when it happened. I have a sister, but she was lost to us in '42 when her Red Cross tent was (we are told) accidentally hit near El Alamein." The large man noticeably shifted in his seat at the recounting of this segment of his sorrowful family history. "Most of your children _have_ parents?"

"Some, yes," the Earl replied. "Some, no. It is uncertain where the Islander children are concerned. We've heard nothing in the three and half years since their evacuation. We still encourage the children to send regular letters through the Red Cross, though."

At this, Legg grunted.

"He is a good boy?" the Earl asked, his interest obvious. "Diligent in his studies? Gets along decently with his fellows?"

"He is a _very_ good boy, Sir Robert. The best. He can get in a brown study now and then, but his teachers have never complained of his schoolwork, only that sometimes he is too fond of pigtails and inkwells, if you take my meaning."

"Yes, well," the Earl chuckled. "We do have some pigtails he might like to dunk. But Lady Sophie has more than proven herself an effective disciplinarian. Would you like to take the train out to Kirk Leaves, say, tomorrow afternoon? See for yourself if it might suit?"

At this, Legg broke eye contact. "Afraid I cannot, Sir, though I would like very much to see it. I am required to stay within a certain radius of my HQ, and call in regularly on such days as today, my afternoon off."

"I see." The Earl grew solemn. "And yet, sight unseen, you wish to place your Mark with me?"

Legg gave a sharp, decisive nod. "_Thesaurus patriae_, Sir."

"'Treasure of the nation'? Aye, Legg, the children, they are."

In a moment, Legg seemed to regret having surrendered his hat to the major domo. His hands seemed just then in need of something to fiddle with. "I must confess, my lord, that there is another way in which I know of you." He brought his gaze to bear. "I knew your son, Robin. We served together, trained together before...the unit's accident."

"Oh," said the Earl, investing that single sound with great depth of meaning. "And," the word was little more than a whisper, as though he needed a glass of water to quench his throat, so unexpected was the reference. He closed his mouth and began again, stronger this time, more himself, "...and so you will also have known Lady Sophie's son..."

"Mitch," Legg agreed. "Better man was never birthed, Sir. No disrespect to your Robin."

"Surely, none taken." The Earl fought the urge to resettle himself in his chair, as though a draft had gone through the room.

Legg nodded. "And so, you see, I know something of you, after all. Which is why I have brought this along with me, as well." He withdrew a sheaf of neatly folded papers from inside his uniform coat and placed them, unopened, on the table between them.

"Those certainly look official," the Earl commented.

"I have been to see my solicitor, Sir, you see. To settle what is to come-what _may be_ to come." Legg moved to push a particularly persistent fall of light yellow hair from out of his eyes, "A man takes on the care of a child and he comes to think about such things that never before worried him. I must plan for Mark's future. His parents have left him a good sum to start life on. I will have my HQ send you regular monies from my wages for his keeping."

The Earl nodded.

"These are his government documents," Legg said, "ration card, a key to my safe deposit box. He will receive my death benefit, in the case of my not returning. All of this is outlined here."

Naval Commander Legg leaned forward in his seat, an eagerness for approval clearly in his eye. "My next request I do not ask you to settle on today, nor, even, tomorrow. But only to consider, and I shall leave the paperwork with you." He patted one of the sheaves of official-looking papers, his the span of his hand almost eclipsing the legal documents. "Should I die, Mark will have what he needs for his keep, and for his modest welfare. But he will have no one on earth to look out for him, to care for him or teach him rightly of the world." The large man took a very, very large breath. "It is my desire that _you_ be that man." He nearly cut his own self off. "NOT in making him your heir, in any way, only, that you consider strongly accepting the potential guardianship of him in the case of my not returning from this imminent mission, or one in future. Making him your ward. If you will do so, sign the papers and have them returned to my solicitor (his name found within) and he will file them discreetly with the courts. If you decline my offer, return them, unsigned. Either way you have my thanks for hearing me out."

Silence (though not an uncompanionable one) fell between the two men.

It was Legg who first broke it. "Will you accept him as a boarder at your Kirk Leaves?"

"I will, without reservation." The Earl laughed a bit. "This is far more of an interview than I have had the pleasure to hold with any of the other children's parents-or guardians. And I'm certain Lady Sophie will be delighted to have him."

"Thank you, Sir. If it would be alright, I will write to you about Mark, perhaps more of his story, his likes and so forth, to help you-and Lady Sophie-along in the care of him."

"I thank you in advance. No doubt such information will prove imminently helpful. But I must ask. Your request of legal guardianship in the event...why me? Whatever would make you think an old man like myself, a widower, was best-suited to permanently take on the care of a young boy?"

For a moment, something about Legg's eyes bordered on bemused, quickly pooling into sincerity. "Robin Oxley is your son?"

The Earl nodded.

Ron Legg all but slapped the table in front of him illustrating the conviction he felt on the subject. "A man need no better reference for fatherhood than that."

* * *

Shortly after, Robert Oxley, Sr., Earl of Huntingdon, bid farewell to the Naval Commander. But he did not immediately surrender the meeting room, after the handshaking and farewells letting the tower-of-a-man find his own way back to the street-level entrance. The Earl had not meant in any way to be discourteous, only, he found he needed some time apart from the club's society to muse on the documents that still occupied this barrister's table.

He thought about Ron Legg, with his firm handshake and obvious concern for his young nephew, his last family left on earth. He thought about how, at their parting, Legg had seemed to gravitate toward being a more convivial chap, and wondered if that might be more of his usual disposition, this particular meeting (and its grave subject matter) dampening that natural boisterousness that perhaps matched his remarkable size.

He thought about how years and years ago, under the looming spectre of the early days of the Great War, someone else in his life had unexpectedly announced the coming of a child. How his own dear Delia had laughed more than usual (and usual was quite a lot) at _that_ evening's dinner (whether her appointed conversation partner was witty or not), danced (for she always wished to have dancing whenever guests came) with a great flourish of skill, and how her eyes had sparked like newly-lit Roman candles that night when he had retired to their chamber.

"There is terrible, grim news to share," she had told him, impish as a pixie.

As was always his way, he fell for her foolishness. "Whatever might it be, my dear?"

"The doctor says...I have only three months to live..." she declared.

The Earl had felt the bellows that were his lungs compress.

"...with this figure."

"Three months?" he had asked, in desperation for clarification.

She smiled so warmly at his disconcertment, her own demeanor still quite merry. "Possibly less." She shook her head in mock-sorrow. "It is a problem many expectant mothers experience, I am told."

"Expectant? Mothers?" he had asked.

And she had nodded.

There had been no need for either of them to sleep _that_ night. Their eyes need not have closed, carrying them into slumber, as with her announcement they were already caught up in a dream.

There at the Grey Goose Club, the Earl thought of that night some thirty-one years ago. Of how dreaming about a child was never the same as having one. The child one dreamed of never the same child one received. Of how parenthood and fatherhood and growing families was easily as significant a commitment as marriage.

_Mark Legg_. Represented in front of him by a small mass of paperwork, government documentation, and what was left in the air of his uncle's goodwill and care for the boy.

In a way, the Earl thought, signing the appropriate papers to make young Mark his potential ward was like committing himself to life, after all this time, entering into a tangible pact to say that he would go on living. That he would make an effort. And not only that, but that he would try to relearn how to teach another person how to live, how to go about life and right and fun (though, of course, it had been Robin who always took the lead in _those_ lessons).

Despite the recent light-hearted turn of events in his life, with the introduction of the displaced children to Kirk Leaves, the Earl did not take such a commitment lightly.

Certainly he would not sign any such papers today, but he would write to Naval Commander Legg to say that he would consider this proposition. It was a fair one, and had been presented fairly. That, he could more than respect. He would meet with Mark Legg, his newest (as of today) boarder, perhaps escort him to Kirk Leaves himself, use the train journey there to learn more of the boy, of the boy's disposition, of his own suitability to take on such a lad.

And perhaps, just perhaps, he might write to Lady Miranda Nighten, simply to gauge what _she_ might think, it always being good to seek out dissenting opinions on any matter of grave importance.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Road from Barnsdale to St. Peter Port -** She had managed to beg off spending any significant amount of time with Geis, citing her desire to get into the capitol and out again, home, so that she might further rest, with all haste.

He had proven amenable to the idea, no doubt expecting (she knew him well-enough after three years to see it in his eyes, the careless lay of his hand on her arm when he addressed her) that the rest she would take upon her return would be in his presence, if not directly within his arms.

She tried not to think about it.

It was an exceptionally lovely autumn day; she was in an exceptionally impressive automobile, with one of Robin's own men at the wheel, and Eleri Vaiser mooning over her (and the shopping trip to come) in the backseat. Conversation proved quite well-rounded and informal among all three, a rare thing to witness in public since the Occupation, which had made letting one's guard down nothing so much as a very bad idea.

The road was rough and rutted at points, not seeing a great deal of upkeep since Islanders were prohibited cars, and each jolt during those sections reminded her of her recent kidnapping, and the rough nights that followed.

They talked of hemlines and fashion (though in their cut-off seclusion from the rest of the larger world, they had no idea what current fashion might be), of (usually out-dated) German and Parisian magazines Geis sometimes brought to Marion showing hairstyles or the particular cut of a blouse.

There was something comforting about discussing such inanities when yards away, to either side of the road, were people, children and families without enough food, without coal for heat, or necessary medicines. Without a matched pair of decently-soled shoes between them.

Usually this inequity would have incensed Marion in its injustice. Enraged her to the point of shaking with it. Today she let it be, she accepted that her only course for the morning was to be one of utter frivolousness. That her outrage must necessarily be banked until the Nightwatch broadcasted. And she let herself feel just a corner of the excitement their excursion had produced in Eleri.

Today Marion would agree to play the role assigned to her. But she had decided: the curtain would fall on that performance this afternoon. There was a freedom, a relief in knowing it.

* * *

Once near the shopping quarter, Marion recommended they leave the car, the streets unused, now, to traffic, a car's presence (and that being known as the Kommandant's) sure to discomfit the locals.

"No, no, Eleri," Marion corrected, noting the Sisters of Ripley Convent had not known to train their young charge in correctly alighting from an automobile. "Place your hand in the one Mr. Allen has offered, your left foot on the step, with your right free to place on the ground."

Eleri tried disembarking again, proving less clumsy this time.

Marion sighed. She could see the task of gentling the girl would prove somewhat daunting. It was not a task she relished, nor wished to devote herself to, but, she did prefer to see things done the right way. Fortunately she had years of governesses, training, texts, and the former Lady Nighten's impeccable first-hand instruction on her side.

As a threesome (Allen appropriately-to-his-station several steps behind) they walked among shops displaying very little inventory, Eleri buying nearly whatever she saw, very certain to pay for anything she added to Allen's array of carried boxes and bags. Such punctiliousness was not a very Jerry-like trait.

But it was not much of a spree, all-told, nineteen-hundred and forty-three too many years into the Occupation to be able to find above-board shops with decent (or plentiful) wares yet to offer. The island's warehouses had long been cleaned out, grandmothers' trunks long ago pillaged for anything remotely saleable, and the Jerries had long since repossessed (with payment, or without) whatever may have caught their eye.

In St. Peter Port, even un-used fabric for a new frock (much less a ready-made new frock) proved as scarce as once-plump Islander faces. Scarce even for the girl now known by all to be the Kommandant's daughter, in the company of a woman long known to be Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer's bride.

"Wot you need to do, Miss Eleri," Allen had devolved into giving her the English address, rather than the German 'Fraulein', "'S get your dad to send to the mainland for you. No doubt he can find something there. There are those, after all-"

Marion snapped open her eyes at him, trying to recall to him that it was not wise to treat Eleri as anything but hostile until they knew her far better, and fearing he was about to reference local Black Market goods, with which Robin and his unit were far from strangers. But a way of procuring goods that certainly Eleri did not need to be acquainted with unless her father chose to acquaint her so.

"Eleri," Marion sang out with far more vim than she felt in an effort to distract the girl from Allen's indiscreetly leading comment, and lying about her own language skills, "would you be so good as to read this poster for me? There are several words here I don't recognize."

Eleri squinted hard at the posted bill. It would seem Marion's true skills with the tongue of the Fatherland might outstrip the girl's. "I do not know this word," Eleri pointed to a long one near the top.

"That is the name of a local cafe, _re_named here by the Germans as Cabaret Alstroemeria," Marion prompted. "It is named in Chilean for a local flower, the Inca lily."

"Oh," said Eleri. "The poster is an advertisement for a new cabaret to open, and its main act, a clairvoyant named Joss Tyr. But why would the announcement only be made in German? How, then, could the Islanders know to go and attend as well?"

Allen lightly sniggered, offering the explanation. "Joss Tyr's the OberAdmiral's pet, Miss Eleri. Anywhere he performs is for Germans only. Islanders _verboten_. No doubt all the handbills for his show are exclusively in German. You needn't worry, though. Being Kommandant's daughter will surely win you an invitation."

But Eleri was already mooning over the next shop window, this time of Ginny Glasson's Beauty Salon, which happened to be the preferred place for any woman on the island consorting with Germans to have her hair and nails done.

The bright lights of only one of her three mirrored stations were turned on, the hairdryers all free.

"Mr. Allen," Marion instructed Allen, "we will go in. You'd best ferry Fraulein Vaiser's," (she deliberately used Eleri's formal title), "parcels back to the car for us, and return in an hour. We should be finished, or nearly so, by that time."

"Lady," Allen said, with a reasonable approximation of deferential head nod, but a far more familiar look in his eye than a chauffeur ought be allowed, and turned to go.

"Lady Marion!" Mrs. Glasson called from over by the manicure cart, where she had been absently inspecting her own cuticles.

They exchanged relative pleasantries, and Marion introduced Eleri.

Ginny Glasson was of a certain age wherein it was no longer seen as polite to speculate about a woman's age. She had been considered by the island to have been a great beauty in her day, and her looks remained very agreeable, if, to those willing to take a closer look, sometimes strained about the eyes.

She had been a nurse prior to the Occupation, and a skilled and well-loved one at that, but the discovered fact that her eldest son served in His Majesty's Navy, and her two younger in the Army, had led to the Germans barring her from any work at hospital. And would have led to worse, had her wits and still-pretty face (and her mature knowledge of how best to use them) not brought her to purchase the salon from one of the last Jewish landlords on Guernsey, who had not chosen to evacuate (to his detriment), and to, within-the-week of purchase re-open it under _her_ name, especially catering to Jerries in need of a manicure, haircut, shave; or their girls, the islands' 'Jerry-bags' looking to be primped and made ready for spending time with their German boyfriends.

In this way, her salon was often a bizarre microcosm of the Occupation, any supplies; nail lacquer, hair dye, pomades, permanent solution, coming to her through German officers who wished her shop (and her) to flourish. Frivolous things brought by supply ships from mainland France and delivered to her, while Islanders suffered for want of basic essentials.

Her shop's pantry was so well stocked it was not unusual to see German soldiers patrolling the shop front after dark, guarding her horde of beauty essentials, scissors and curlers, as well as soaps, alcohol and liniments, lotions and healing balms for massages and necessary disinfecting of her utensils.

Often one could expect to see her shop bustling with customers, Jerries opening charge accounts there for their best girls, rarely refusing to pay Mrs. Glasson for her services. In fact, often over-tipping her in Reichmarks for particularly satisfying conclusions to evenings prepared for under her careful aesthetician's eye.

They treated her as something between a retired beauty queen, a high-end brothel's respected madam, and an invaluable bartender, to whom one might talk casually about things not of the war, but of home, of love and infatuation, of the weather and travel and being away from loved ones. To them she had come to represent an impenetrable bubble of normalcy, her nursing past, her sons in service to their enemy forgotten as though she had been re-born, sprung to life fully-formed at the salon's opening under her shingle.

Marion was no stranger to the salon, and neither was Eva, who had not had occasion to wash her own hair in the cottage's enamel basin since shortly after the Occupation began.

"It is true, then," Mrs. Glasson was saying, her eyes going to Marion's cheek and the Nazi doctor's stitches visible, there.

Marion wore her hair in a snood, concealing for the most part its having been shorn. "Does news travel so fast, even without wireless?" she asked, willing her hand not to self-consciously rise to shield the stitching from view.

"_C'est la Guernsey_, Marion," Ginny Glasson smiled. "You were an object of interest on the island long before the Occupation and all other modes of entertainment were taken from us. Gossip is about all the vice we Islanders have energy left for. You were gone for days, disappeared. Is it true your attacker took a knife to your lovely hair?"

Best, Marion supposed, to simply speak of it, refusing to do so coming off as strange, if not haughty, and putting a far more shocking spin on her mis-adventure than she felt was necessary. "He cut it on account of my being..." even though she knew the word could not hurt her, even though it would have been flung at Ginny Glasson, at Eva just as often, she stumbled in the saying of it, "a Jerry-bag. The whole disaster was my fault." Ginny was steering her toward a chair in front of one of the light-bulbed mirrors. "You see, I had bribed a boatman to take me to Alderney so that I might spend Geis' birthday with him..."

She did not see Eleri's (just behind her) reaction to this confession. The girl nearly had to take a seat she was so close to swooning with the romantics of it all. It was as though she could almost hear music swelling with sentiment in the background to the story.

As she made her way across the shop's open floor, Marion half-stumbled in her shoe, having stepped poorly and aggravated the wounds on her foot.

Ginny looked down, taking in the _very_ unfashionable wrapping of bandages below Marion's calves. Momentarily her voice lost its chattiness. "Come to the back with me, _now_." She directed Marion to the hallway and small rooms behind a hung curtain. "Miss Eleri," she instructed the girl over her shoulder, "do keep Count von Himmel company for me. He is renting a station from me, here, while he prepares to open his act at the cafe-that is, the Cabaret-Alstroemeria just through the alley to the rear of my shop."

She had gotten Marion to a chair set up with a large basin for foot soaking, and proceeded to unbind her bandages. She kept her conversation light, and when she did ask questions about Marion's injuries, they were also delivered lightly, making them easy to answer, and not making her seem to pry. With the speed and dispatch of an excellent nurse she had cleaned (with topical solutions from her impressive store) and re-dressed Marion's feet, examining the stitches on her face and neck, Marion's wrist bandages concealed from view under the long sleeves she wore.

"I do not know," Marion confessed, "if it is Geis' plan to shuttle me back to Alderney to be seen again by the German doctor." She sighed. "I do not know why I could not be just as well cared for by a physician _here_."

At this statement (unusually verbose for the often inscrutable Marion Nighten), Mrs. Glasson's eyes took on a certain sparkle. "Why not let him know you would prefer to have done?" she asked, shrugging, as though the request would be a small enough one to make. "As long as your Lieutenant sees to it the Guernsey doctor of your choice is properly supplied with the necessary medical provisions, an island doctor can do as well for you at this point as Hippocrates himself." The sparkle twinkled. "And anything left over might well benefit another islander in need..." She bent her head to the task of tying Marion's shoes for her. "You might speak with Eva as well. Her mother, Hilda, is sure to have a poultice at the ready for decreasing any scarring from the stitching on your cheek." She had not waited for an answer to her unexpected proposal, had not tried to make the statement significant, or push for its acceptance.

Before Marion knew it, she was ushered out beyond the privacy curtain into the shop proper to find Eleri in eager contemplation of a man at the large mirror, an array of face paints, brushes and cold cream before him on the counter.

"...And so you are here, from this other island, Jersey, to perform?"

"At the OberAdmiral's direct request, Fraulein. It is most-important to always mention that. You will note it is printed so on all the posted bills: 'command performance'."

Marion spoke. "But will you not be further away from Prinzer's usual billet? I have heard it said his ship rarely leaves the waters about Jersey."

The man turned and looked at her. Distractingly his face was half-painted and made-up, a smile drawn upon half his lips, flecks of shiny metallic confetti or some such sprinkled at one temple and along one cheekbone. The other half was completely bare. On this side even his beard was evident. She noticed a patch of irregular scarring along the underside of his unpainted jaw.

Seeing her eyes go to it, he brought up his hand to scratch it, as though absentmindedly.

He got the reaction he had been looking for. Upon realizing the hand that did the scratching was not simply gloved, but, in fact, partially wood, its fingers petrified and immoveable, Marion's eyes (only her eyes) startled.

"Joss Tyr," he said, stepping out of the salon chair to introduce himself to her with his stage name. "Though Frau Glasson, here, prefers Count von Himmel." He used a gloved hand to indicate the un-made-up side of his face, seeming woeful in contrast to its opposite half, though in truth his un-painted expression was genial enough. "And no, I will not be far from the OberAdmiral, who has chosen to decamp for a period to the waters of the Guernsey bailiwick."

His eyes blinked, and Marion thought she saw something very like diamond dust on his painted lid. Distracted, she did not immediately notice when he took her left hand in the appropriately courtly fashion of the aristocracy.

The wood of his fingers was startling to the touch, even through the soft leather of his kid gloves, the fact that some of the fingers were still his own, uninjured and lissome, adding to the unsettling quality of the tactile encounter.

Because he had her left hand, he had access to her bare ring finger. "Missing ring?" he asked, obviously aware that she was engaged. His eyes were like astrolabes, distant celestial bodies shining through them as she looked into them, unable for the moment to look away. He feigned concern. "That's going to be a problem," he tutted. "Bit of a habit with you, isn't it? Misplacing rings...and suitors?"

"You, Sir," Marion, in knee-jerk reaction to her consternation and astonishment replied, "are _very_ forward."

"And you, Lady," Tyr parried the barb, clearly enjoying himself, "would like nothing so very much as to," he rolled his fingers to mimic the words, "Go. Back..."

Fortunately Eleri (who had been looking on raptly nearby) burst in to the dangerous exchange, demanding a reading of her own.

Joss Tyr turned back to the girl, his ego (or his alleged psychic gift) redirecting his energies momentarily, and he released Marion from his grip. "You," he smiled at Eleri, "I have already prophesied about. As for a reading..." He closed his eyes and seemed to meditate a moment. "_You_...will not see your hair cut off today, though you are planning to ask Frau Glasson to do so. And you will not yet lose your heart to another, either, though you are _ever_ planning to do so." At this, he performed a small bow, and in an instant, instead of the man, the German aristocrat and former soldier, the cabaret act known as Joss Tyr seemingly evaporated, re-coalescing into a dove, cooing as it perched in Eleri Vaiser's hand, where the man, now disappeared, had held it in his.

At this vanishing act, Eleri quite giddy with the assumed magic of the trick, Marion quite ready to conclude the shopping trip, Allen came to collect them (as told). He returned them to Barnsdale, driving the Kommandant's Guernsey car back to St. Peter Port where it would be stored until Vaiser again visited, and where Allen could catch a boat back to Alderney, and his driving job (long hours yet, still left in the day) there.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** _A brief note of apology...followed by a longer note of story specifics that you may enjoy reading, or you may find unnecessary to peruse. I wrote it out to answer a question Marjatta had, so I include it here._

**A Brief Note of Apology:** Still trying to get England and the Islands on the same time frame. Not much time has passed on the Islands since the beginning of "_Don't Go Walkin' Down Lover's Lane_" (less than a week,actually), and as I write on an ongoing basis (that is, I don't have a bunch of story banked or completed that's not been posted), I find that I'm writing about happenings in England that are not taking place at the same rate. Time in England seems to move faster.  
So, Ron Legg visiting the Earl did NOT happen only hours (or even, only days) after the Earl started taking in children at Kirk Leaves (after all, at the story's beginning on the Islands, in October, we got a segment where the Earl is still alone, and asking Lady Nighten what to do with his estate, etc.). I *could* leave the Ron Legg/Grey Goose interlude and post it further into our story, but something tells me that it feels like the right thing to put here, in Chapter 13, even if England and the Islands are kept in disharmony timeline-wise for a little longer.  
Please consider repair of this tear in the time/space continuum (which, yes, I do find worrying) as ongoing.  
[calmingbreez, this segment's for you]

**A Longer Note Addressing Story Specifics:**

**Descending Hierarchy/Order of** (author-manufactured) **Military Ranks, divided by Forces**  
_(Historical figures are used only insofar as to further illustrate rankings. Story characters' names are italicized.)_

**Axis**  
+ Chancellor Hitler (aka the Fuehrer)

+ Field Marshal (in German: _Feldmarschall_) Rommel (controlled action in entire African theatre of operations). The rank of 'field marshal' is generally the highest rank of any officer in the army (it is in Britain), however, as there are multiple theatres (and multiple armies) during wartime, there may be more than one individual granted the rank. [The US military does not use this title/rank.]

+ _Gruppenfeldmarschall Baron Diederich von Bachmeier_. It is unclear what Vaiser's ex-wife's current husband (and Eleri's step-father) is specifically in charge of, but he is one step removed from a full Field Marshal, so it's safe to say that not only is he noble (a Baron), he is extremely powerful and important, and Vaiser himself has referred to him as his boss. This is not a real rank, but '_gruppen_' is attached to many German military ranks as a qualifier. [Coincidentally, my favorite *actual* German rank is '_obergruppenfuehrer_'. Mostly because it seems like a lot to shout in a battle.]

+ _OberAdmiral Jan Prinzer_ (controls/oversees all of the Channel Islands). I have chosen to make him an Admiral (Navy) because it makes sense to me that the Navy would be best suited to oversee the occupation of the Islands.

+ _Island Kommandant_ (Guernsey is more populous, but _Vaiser_ is at least equal to or above the Guernsey Island Kommandant, due to _his_ island, Alderney, being 100% Reich prisoners or soldiers under his direct rule, and therefore his position and power on it/over it resembles more that of an all-powerful king or despot.

+ (*Historically, Alderney was the domain of the SS [the _Schutzstaffel_], and certainly here I imagine Vaiser and Geis as members of that elite group of soldiers, defined in my dictionary as, 'a unit of Nazis created to serve as bodyguard to Hitler and later expanded to take charge of intelligence, central security, policing action, and the mass extermination of those considered inferior or undesireable'. They would have operated largely independently of the regular army-perhaps, depending on how kindly you may view them, a bit like the Knights Templar, or, we would certainly say, The Black Knights. This group became increasingly powerful and influential as the war went on, their willingness to kill over little and do whatever they deemed necessary to achieve their ends a powerful deterrent to disobeying them, even among other branches of the Reich's military. Their direct allegiance was to the SS, and Hitler, and at a certain point they would have held a sort of 'diplomatic immunity' or something where the regular army, etc. was concerned. *This may also indicate that while _Prinzer_ is _Vaiser_'s on-site boss, _Baron Bachmeier_ may be his SS boss-the man to whom he ultimately answers.)

+ _Lieutenant_ (pronounced in German 'LOYT-nant') _Herr Geis Gisbonnhoffer_ (obviously other ranks would exist separating him and Vaiser, we just have not seen any in the story thus far) [*I like to employ the use of 'Herr' sometimes in Geis' title, to give the impression of his series' qualifier 'Sir'. I do not know if a soldier w/ a military rank would ever be addressed by his non-military title (the equivalent of 'Mister') or not.]

+ _ReichKaptain Lamburg_ A sticky situation here, his actual rank is lower than Geis' (who is in charge of the Treeton Camp), HOWEVER, Lamburg has an entire island (Sark) under his command (though its population of around 470 is far less than Treeton Camp's. The total inmate population of all camps on Alderney-there were four-was about 6K souls), so his position is fluid. On Sark he outranks Geis, off Sark he is closer to his equal, but he is given certain privileges, level of deference etx, as a 'three-quarters Island Kommandant'.

+ _Operation Todt Officer Count Werner von Himmel_ The former soldier now known as cabaret performer Joss Tyr was tasked to Operation Todt, the military name given to the program of prisoner workers/slave laborers (mostly Eastern European) who were shipped onto the Islands and used to build fortifications and to mine the beaches (65K+ landmines on Jersey alone) for defense purposes. Their lives (the prisoner workers') were easily as gruesome and cruel as those prisoners condemned to the camps.

+ _Underlieutenant Diefortner_, Vaiser's adjutant

+ _Specialist Joseph_, just that, a soldier with a 'specialty'.

+ Landser (actual WWII German military rank) a left-over title from when armies had branches of cavalry ('lancer' in English, because they carried lances). Recall that WWI was fought still with cavalries in play.

+ Private

**Non-combatants**  
+ _Bailiff Jodderick_, the bailiwick of Guernsey's highest civilian official (recall, the bailiwick includes more than just the island of Guernsey). Obviously, _Jodderick_ is based on the BBC RH series character, and has no resemblance to the actual individual who historically held this office during the Occupation.

+ All other members of Guernsey's the States (legislature), which would oversee all the islands, save Jersey. *(At least this is the way I understand it as working. It may be that the Bailiff and Le Seigneur are on par, as are the members of the States on par with Sark's conseilliers.)

+ Le Seigneur, Sark's highest civilian official. During the Occupation it was Dame Sibyl Hathaway (for the most part it had always been men, hence the masculine title, 'Le' on the masculine proper noun). There is both a play and a book about her extraordinary life. If I understand correctly, this position is often heredity, but can be sold, so that today's Seigneur is not descended from the original De Carteret.)

+ _Stephen La Salle_, 'conseiller', holding a seat (as does each of the 40 or so-at this time, only male-tenants on Sark) on Sark's parliament, Chief Pleas.

+ Constable - member of Island-based law enforcement, usually working in tandem (though, obviously, no long with any true power) with the German occupiers.

**Allies**  
It is not my intent to try and harmonize ranks between the two warring forces. You can try your own hands at that conundrum when you find the time. *It is probably good to note, that even during WWII (and _certainly_ during WWI), the British military still largely operated with commissioned officers being members of the nobility, enlisted men being not. Of course, with enough money, one might buy oneself a commission. So, some things had not changed so significantly from the Crusades, or from the writing of Jane Austen's Napoleonic Wars-era novels. Noblemen were still knights (officers), regular people were still foot soldiers in thrall to them on the battlefield.

It was not impossible (especially in WWI) to find yourself a middle-aged man with both life and combat experience answering to a nineteen-year-old officer because he was born to the gentry.

In _this_ story, I am giving _Wills Reddy_ the backstory of being from the middle class (you may recall his father, here, was a successful furniture manufacturing merchant with several factories). So _Wills_ (as a commissioned officer would need) has a university education. (Not like the series, but still, he has a skill, and that is what it is meant to represent; him as a craftsman, not as simply an unskilled serf worker. The series' Dan Scarlet is called 'a skilled laborer' by Robin, who built 'half this [Locksley] village'. This gives the Scarlet/Reddy family a level of status a mere field laborer would not have had.)

**Based at home:**  
+ _Clem Nighten_ - Quite high up at MI-6/SIS. He's more or less worked for the Ministry since leaving university in 1932. We're never certain how much he knows or how powerful he is. (I'm unclear if he would hold a military rank or simply a civilian title. I do know he doesn't wear a uniform.) He is powerful enough to wrangle permission to 'interview' one of the German lightkeepers pinched in the commando raid of Les Casquets when his 'interview' only really consists of self-serving personal questions about the welfare and lives of Marion and his father.

+ _Roger Stoker_, Intelligence officer previously assigned to the British 8th Army/the Italian Front - Ranked below Clem, and probably quite far (though even _Stoker_ is not sure by how much), but still of great importance (if not great status) to SIS. A field operative as opposed to a 'desk jockey'. (C'mon, do you think James Bond has a desk-and a filing cabinet?) Though currently being treated a bit shabbily by SIS in where he is being housed, he would outrank Robin and all of Unit 1192. As you recall, he claimed Robin's recruitment into His Majesty's Service as his own doing, so he has both rank and tenure on his side.

+ _Naval Commander Ron Legg_

**Stranded on the Islands:**  
I have deliberately NOT given specific ranks (only specific duties) to Unit 1192. I like to pretend that they're so covert that they are not even allowed to reference their specific military titles/ranks amongst each other. Perhaps when the day comes that they return to England someone will address them appropriately and then we'll find out.

Commissioned Officers:  
+ _Robin Oxley_ - highest-ranking Allied officer on the Channel Islands

+ _Mitch Bonchurch_ - Navigation Officer [I don't know. I guess, as we know, at one time they had a boat. Really, I just thought it would be funny to put Much in charge of directions.]

+ _Wills Reddy_ - Communications Officer

Enlisted Men:  
(in no particular order*)

+ _Allen Dale_ - Reconnaissance and Acquisitions

+ _Richard Royston_ - Explosives

+ _Iain "John" Johnson_ - Medic

*I assume they decide who is to be in charge of whom based on whose skill is most called for at any given moment. So if they are laying dynamite, Roy's in charge, etc.

Royal Air Force:  
+ _Eagle Squadron Flight Commander Thomas Carter_ - Equivalent-ish rank of Mitch and Wills, still subject to taking orders from Robin. (This is an actual rank used in Eagle Squadron, though I cannot tell you more than that.)

**Elsewhere in the Field:**  
+ _U.S. 5th Army Captain - Italian Front - Fred Otto_. Fred's rank will probably change before we see him again (in WWII if you managed to stay alive you could jump through the ranks quite quickly, even-at least in the American forces, not sure about the British-receive a battlefield commission, and leapfrog from enlisted man over to officer). For the purposes that Fred has no one else in the storyline to be placed up against in status, I would rank Fred (at this rank) on par with Mitch and Wills and Carter. 


	14. Writings of Loved Ones

**ALDERNEY -**_ By all things just and holy, he would never again be able to stomach any man by the name of Joseph._

His mind retreated, se defendendo.

The English hospital ward had been airy. Sunny, even, by turns. Still, this far removed from that injury, that time, Mitch could smell something of the tincture of that unforgotten air if he concentrated hard enough. Something clean, but more antiseptic than truly fresh.

Naturally, they none of them in the unit received visitors. Only, each other.

Allen had been taken off that day by the doctors, driven somewhere to see yet another specialist.

Mitch had spent the morning, well into the early afternoon, alone, only the occasional nurse for company - and brief company it always proved to be. He had taken out Cora's letter. He could not say specifically why - why he had kept it, nor why that day had so called to him to find and re-read it.

Melancholy, Mitch supposed, coupled with the nagging of pains he was only beginning to understand might well be with him for a long while, if not forever. Loneliness. The unit's patriotic agreement to remain 'dead men' cutting him closer to the quick than the others, his relationship with his mother, the widowed Lady Sophie Miller, so close, so tender. And, he was finding, far more central to his life -his dependably cheery nature - than he had expected.

And so, the self-loathing need to re-read Cora's 'Dear John' letter. '_15 June 1939_', it began. He could all but have recited it. '_My darling Mitch, You have been away so long. Do you remember me even a little bit?_'

As was her way, she shared news from home, pedestrian facts about the price of this or that, a new hat she had wished to buy. Her ongoing quandary of whether to pursue war work of some kind. And then, just before the closing. '_I am sure you will understand, you dear, dear boy. Things have changed so much at home since you left to join the service. I know it has not been so very long by the calendar, but it has by my heart. And I do not doubt, though you are too much a gentleman to say, also by yours. Mother and Father both think it best we no longer pursue our engagement. Though, of course, they, as do I, wish you all the very best. You always have, and always will, deserve the very best. Cora_'.

No declaration of love, nor even sincerity. No closing of any kind. As though she had signed it just in case he had, perhaps, been engaged to multiple girls, and she were just making sure he knew by which one he was to be thrown over.

He thought of her, of Cora, fourth daughter of Lord and Lady Winchester, their title and fortune entailed away from them as they had birthed no sons. Surely _he_ had seemed the answer to their dilemma. He had not even made their acquaintance prior to his uncle's finally settling the inheritance of Bonchurch upon him, and not another of his male cousins.

Cora, the future Lady Bonchurch.

Their courtship, though not lengthy before he had applied for a commission in His Majesty's service, had been one marked by great vivacity, and to any observer, great like-mindedness. Everything pleased them. Her red hair and freckles in just the right, just the most charming, amount pleased him. His fine teeth, and smile, she said, pleased her.

No one could have debunked the pairing of them. Despite her family's need of him, of his title, he loved her (he _thought_ he had loved her a great deal), and her affection for him would have taken a far-better actress than she was to fake.

Her written rejection had come at so unexpected a moment those months ago, for it was late fall, now, the first Christmas soon to pass wherein they would all have to learn to celebrate as dead men.

He wondered. At news of his 'death' would she mourn him? This (by her reckoning) _ex_-fiance? Would she feel relieved to have escaped before his funeral (whatever, however, that might be managed and performed)? Or would she regret her letter of months prior? Wish that she had simply waited, letting Fate take its course? If she had, she would not have had the smudge of a broken promise on her conscience. On her reputation.

He sighed. They would have had such perfect children, little red-headed cherubs (the girls), little red-headed tykes (the boys). He was thinking on these dolorous thoughts when an unexpected breeze against his privacy curtain signaled a visitor.

It had been Robin. He was up and about, but not by much, still in a wheeled chair that required an orderly or nurse to push him about.

Without any real encouragement on Mitch's part, Robin rattled on without any real focus about this and that, allowing Mitch to remain introspective, and deeply mired in the wretchedness of Cora's old letter. He asked Mitch no personal questions. (Mitch usually more than willing to volunteer personal information when no one else was wishing for it.) He did not inquire as to his injuries, nor his present state of mind. (Again, Mitch usually sharing such information with anyone speedily upon encountering them.)

"Sometimes," Robin shared, "I think the orderlies may well get lost among all these long corridors..."

Mitch's temper with Robin was (without valid reason) to the boiling. Though he had not mentioned his black mood to his friend, he seethed that Robin had not detected it, not asked after it, not empathized with his (unspoken) dejection. "Want to get lost, you say?" Mitch sniped, striking out at the man he'd risked (and gladly) his own life to save, his tone quite poisonous, "Why don't you bloody well start practicing now?"

Robin's jaw tucked under for a moment. It appeared as if he might ask some question as to the unexpected remark. His eyebrows contracted, and his eyes took on the cast of a particularly petted dog unused to mistreatment. He could not leave on his own power. The orderly presently in charge of moving about his chair had gone for tea break.

And so they had sat there, Mitch deeply awash in high dudgeon, Robin gobsmacked into silence, but unable to take any physical action in response.

_Trying not to shout in pain, Mitch thought again of Robin's eyes in reaction to his unexpected lashing out. And he knew he could not do it, not as he had planned. Rage, fury, wrath. They were not truly available to him. Hatred of Robin was beyond his reach. Always had been. No doubt, in some part that very fact incensed him more from time to time than true hatred might, when he might wish it were not so truly unattainable for him._

And so he had lost his grip on it: this thing that he had depended upon keeping him alive through this present torment. And losing his grip, the floor fell out from underneath him.

Then, he screamed.

* * *

Allen Dale, masquerading as Dale Allen, Nazi-employed chauffeur, drove up to the Treeton Camp and began waiting outside the Kommandant's car as he had been instructed to do upon disembarking at the harbor. Herr Kommandant was somewhere inside, in a meeting. Allen was to attend on him once it was concluded. Everything back to normal.

Here came Anya Grigorovna. She was clean and tidy as ever, but something about her face appeared unusually drawn, pinched in a way he had not noticed before. Allen paused for a moment, wondering if he saw it so only in relation to the well-fed cheeks and curves of Marion, and even the still-coming-on figure of Eleri Vaiser, the women with whom he had spent so much time over the past two days.

Uncharacteristically Anya made a direct beeline to him and the car, not bothering (as usual) to conceal her interest in arriving there.

"Hullo," he called, friendly as always.

"Mr. Allen," she began, quite earnestly.

_Perhaps she had news of Mitch, knew him to be there already, even before he had planned to ask her._

"Mr. Allen, what news have you for me?"

_Right. The flier, and perhaps the Gypsy boy - doubtless both on her mind since Carter's very public escape. The Gypsy boy, he seemed to recall, was a friend of hers. And her a woman with very little contact among anyone friendly._

"The very best kind," Allen assured her, patting at his uniform pockets to locate his matches, fag already between his half-parted lips. "_None_." He gave her a wink.

He had expected her to visibly relax at this information, in the knowledge that the man she help escape was safe, no longer, even, being sought by his former captors. She did not.

His own face slightly fell at her lack of demonstrated relief. "What's wrong, Annie?" He could not afford subtlety. She was allotted so little time to be out-of-doors.

Her eyes had trouble steadily holding onto his. They anxiously flicked about everywhere. "There has been a fast-working illness since last I saw you. It swept through my mother's cell bloc." Her eyes shot heavenward. "She died three days ago. Herr Geis has been at his post so infrequently since the escape, I...I took it upon myself to look into files I am not meant to see. I was searching for news of my father, my other family here. I wanted to get word to them, somehow. To tell them of my mother - "

Allen resisted the gut-impulse to reach for her hand. All this sadness, and no one for her to share it with, penned up here in the officers' administration building. His spoken prompt was just above a whisper, "And?"

"German files do not lie, Mr. Allen."

Her unexpectedly solemn face now held context for him.

"What I found showed me: my family is dead. Everyone I came here with, gone. Extinguished. My uncles, my aunt, even cousins." Her brows drew into a wrinkle as she referenced Gisbonnhoffer. "_He_ knew, all along - if he had cared to look - and he never even told me. I am alone." Her eyes came back to his, tears having gathered in them. "I am ready to go," she told him, her voice's strength disappearing into murmur, "as you have always said I might."

Allen, as was his way, smiled his confidence into those tear-filled eyes. "Then we shall get you out, as I have always said," he almost added 'my girl', before recalling to his mind that she was not a woman to lightly treat so. "I shall put my friends on it this very day." With an unpleasant twinge, his mind brought him back to Mitch. "_Only_..."

"Yes?"

"Only, can I get you to stick it out just a bit longer? Two days? Perhaps less. Quite possibly _far_ less. Only, there is a man being held here, and I must find him. More important than the flier that we find him, and get him out."

One could see her going through recent detainees in her mind. "The Sarkese fisherman?" she asked, her tone understandably disconcerted.

"The very one! Is he already released?"

"No. Not yesterday, and no one has left the camp the entire day, not since Herr Kommandant arrived."

Allen slightly bit his lip, all but having forgotten the unlit cigarette he had left hanging there. "Will you do it, Love?" He winced inwardly at the endearing term, but he needed every ounce of persuasion on his side - on Mitch's side. "Will you do it...for me?"

Anya's mouth gaped for a moment, his request not expected by her, so many times he had attempted to cajole her into escaping (only to have her resist on account of her family), yet here he was begging her to stay on. Her eyes slid over toward the nearest guard, whose stance had become wary, as her time to return indoors grew near.

"Yes," she said, almost as an exhale, but not one of relief. "I will stay for your friend. I will find where he is for you, and how you may best help him."

"Good girl," Allen told her, his own relief such that he did not mark the painful resignation on display in her lonely walk back toward Gisbonnhoffer's office.

* * *

**SARK -** Iain Johnson felt oddly nostalgic for this small patch of an island. The scant hours he and Royston had just put in below-ground, attempting to map and vet the structures remaining in the long-abandoned mines on Little Sark had left him colder, more antsy, more desperate for fresh air than he could recall in all his years in the Scots collieries where he had made his living prior to the war.

And so, it had been such a relief to ascend from the darkness (darker than usual, as they had no proper mining tools nor headlamps between them) to the snap in the air that told one, without a doubt, that one was on Sark.

He had grown, not without noticing, fond of the island, almost aggressively so. Had he been given to poetry or sketching, doubtless it would have become his main muse and inspiration. Had he been given to much conversation he might have bored his fellows with talk of it, the thousand ways it called to him.

As was, he held the growing love of it within, knowing the only thing that stood in the way of his giving himself wholly over to this land were the Jerries that occupied it. And so his war (in loving this island, its simple commerce and uncomplicated people) had become far more personal since Unit 1192 had found themselves stranded here, without possibility of imminent escape. It was, for him, as if the Jerries had invaded and occupied Scotland itself, and he fought and schemed to foil them with the same vigor and commitment as if they had. For Sark, he had found, had come to match (if not threaten to replace) Scotland in his loyal heart.

"You think too much of blowing things up," he scolded Royston.

"And you, too much of _patching_ things up, anymore," Royston bit back, exasperation rather than anger in his tone. "I do think," only with John would he express himself in such not-quite-certain terms, "charges placed properly, and in calculated consideration of what locations we wish to enlarge, will buy us both the space and the concealment needed for a long, covert entrenchment."

The day had been above-average windy. Their crossing of the isthmus at La Coupee had proven to require enough attention in order to keep from being blown away entirely that their conversation (such as it was) had fallen silent for the length of that segment of their journey back to La Salle's. It was, more or less, the only time Royston had stopped his tongue from wagging about his grand plans for the abandoned mines.

"There is not much wrong with La Salle's house," John had gruffly protested at one point. He, himself, was uncommonly fond of the place. It had been a long time since he had found himself in an actual and true home. It lacked only a woman, he thought, to feel fully homey.

"Only that it has no place to hide us all should the day come."

"Aye," John had agreed, never one to dissent in the face of reason. "But your thoughts on the matter are motivated at least as much by your wandering sailor's soul as by concern over our fate should we all be caught out there."

Not answering, Royston had again returned to planning more explosions.

This had carried them onto the fringes of La Salle's tenement, enough time having passed in their absence they could be fairly certain the service held for Dick Giddons had concluded.

They spied the house in question in the near distance, the figure of someone, a man, yet at the grave they two and Robin had dug out just that morning.

As they mounted the last stile before the barnyard gate, John finally answered Royston with the sentiment he had been answering him with in his head for the last two-thirds of their journey. "Still," he declared, "I would sleep better in this underground castle you have conceived if we could find an Islander who knows the shafts, the layout, and possible structural weaknesses."

"Well...aye, John, aye," Royston agreed, "but where're we gonna hunt up a gran'da who's enough of his mind to recall tunnels and galleries of summat dug a hundred year ago?"

"Tush," John called him down, no longer engaged in the discussion, having recognized the form sitting alongside the grave. "Get yourself to the house, then, Man. Tell the others all about it."

"But you'll be along, right, John?"

"Shortly," he assured Royston. " I willna tarry longer than necessary."

Royston struck out in the direction of the stone farmhouse, cheered, no doubt, by sight of the chimney's smoke, the flowers set in the south-facing window to designate that it was safe to approach.

John turned himself in the direction of the grave, which had been covered both with dirt, and also a thick topping of large stones. It was Blind La Salle who sat upon the hem of the stones, his knees apart, his elbows to them, his face toward the sky.

Other than the mound, the grave was yet unmarked by cross or headstone.

Stephen had heard the limp in Royston's gait upon the barnyard ground, and knew him to be walking with another. It was no great leap to perceive that it was John. "I am undone," he told the big man. His voice was unfamiliar, unsteady and uncertain in a way Stephen's voice simply never was. "I believe, actually, John, that today, this day, this grim, grim, day, has taken from me everything I had left to give. The very last...anything...that I had been saving to help in enduring this occupation, this...separation." He did not say Louise's name, but it hung heavily in the air about him. "A three-legged chair will still support weight, if somewhat unevenly so. With Dick...without Dick - my chair is knocked down to but two legs..."

John looked down to the blind rector, this man he had so greatly come to respect. Without speaking in reply to Stephen's speech, he simply lowered himself down onto the hem of the stones mounding the grave, took his place at his friend's side, and prepared to listen.

"Dick was third son of another tenant. His first brother would inherit, his second, run the fishing boat for the Giddons' family. Each tenement here is plotted as large enough to support, and be worked by, a single family. As he grew, there was nothing for him on their farm. I took him on here. It was my intent, always my intent, to declare him my heir. Such rights here may not pass to a woman. And I knew, he was such a good boy, such a blessing to us, I knew he would care for Louise - let her live on here - should anything happen to me. He had become so like my son." He paused, having never said the words with such finality out loud, "the only child I would ever have."

Stephen rubbed at his face with his hands like he was attempting to scrub something from it. "There was such peace in that. In knowing such things were settled." His mind circled again and again over things he believed he had mis-calculated, disastrous errors in his judgment, fear that his own pride, his own self-satisfaction in his counsel might prove his downfall. "It does not usually bother me, you know," he spoke to John as though the larger man might answer. "Being without sight."

In the distance two gulls called for one another.

"But I could not even navigate my own vessel to bring her back home." In his fretful actions, he withdrew his clay pipe from his shirt pocket and began to idly play with it in his grown-fidgety hands. "Would you take me, _would_ you cross the Channel to help me bring her home?"

Enough silence passed that John knew he would have to answer. He shook his head, never one to offer an untruth. "I wouldna. 'Tis suicide to attempt a crossing in such a small boat. For if the waves and the capricious weather do not sink you, U-boats and Jerry patrols will."

Stephen's shoulders had begun to shake as he listened to John tell him exactly the facts that he already knew.

John took his hand, and laid it across the former rector's shoulders.

"I have not the words any longer to express how much I need her here," Stephen declared. "For every triumph," he cleared his tear-clogged throat, "and I know we've had many, and for every tragedy," he did not reference Dick outright, "I find myself frightened. For everything that comes to pass, it further separates us. Estranges us, even. The things, the life we were meant to share - I want only to live that again. Even if it had to be here, during these times. Even if it means selfishly condemning her to suffering so that she might be by my side." He gasped quietly, his speech further exhausting him. "There, I have said it. I'll speak on it no more. Today is a day of mourning, and so I mourn." He stopped, as though he were indeed through, only to complete a quick intake of breath before adding, "the others have drummed it out of Robin, John. Mitch has been taken to Alderney for questioning, has been detained. Allen was there when it happened." Stephen's lower jaw began to shudder. "And so, in thinking I knew what was best, convincing the Lady Marion to go with him, I have lost us Mitch...to an uncertain future."

John deeply inhaled at the unexpected news. He reached for Stephen's pipe, and using both his hands (his arm now removed from his friend's shoulders), he re-packed what tobacco there was left in it, added just a pinch of what he had remaining in his own pouch. This done, he replaced the pipe, ready to light, in Stephen's hands.

After this action a beat passed. John thrust his chin to the afternoon sky, and let out with a stream of Gaelic, his rumbling tone reverent, unlike the usual times when he chose his mother-tongue to express anger or condemnation. "My gran used to say that to us often. The English, I believe, is "_whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith._" He continued to look beyond the barnyard, at the Sark landscape, knowing quite clearly what the nature of the mountain he would pray to see removed was.

Here, Stephen took over, using his shirt cuffs to dry his eyes, as his handkerchiefs were all left behind in the house. "_Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye shall receive them, and ye shall have them._" He reached out and found John's shoulder, using a handhold there to lever himself up from where he had been sitting. They two passed some time thus: Stephen standing, his face to the wind, John seated upon the edge of the grave, each with his own thoughts.

The wind switched its direction, and Stephen sensed Robin heading over in their direction from where he had left the cozy indoors of the house. "Do you hear that, Robin?" he asked, more of his usual self returning, "'_And when you stand praying,_' it is written following, '_forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses'_."

"As I have said, Stephen," Robin spoke out to the man gently, "I hold you no grudge. The responsibility in the matter is not yours."

The rector disagreed, shaking his head. He had not been at asking forgiveness in the taking of Mitch. "It is Mr. Carter I recall to your mind, Robin."

Predictably overlooking the rector's repeated request for reconciliation between him and the flier, Robin looked to John, and seeing the grim set of his mouth discerned that Stephen had told him the dismaying news. "We wait for Allen," he added. "For what information he might bring."

John nodded, resolute, and the three men walked as a group back to the house.

* * *

**GUERNSEY -** Sir Edward, Lord Nighten looked at his only daughter's photograph. He had removed it from the album and he held it within his slightly shaking grip. She could not have been more than eight when it had been taken. The small white lapdog of his wife's (_what had it been called? Caesar?_) had squirmed at the last minute, blurring a large percent of the otherwise impeccable studio picture. But not, somehow, Marion's face. That illuminating endowment of natural intelligence showing there much as it had in life. Distortion, obscurement all about her, but Marion: firm, strong, _present_. And always: aware.

_His girl_.

"Father," she used to call him. Never Poppa, never Papa. Always serious in her address of him, formal. And yet, in her interaction with him, exactly the opposite. When she was at home, his knee was never chilly, his side never lonely, for she was there. And so often the perfect companion.

Miranda had said he spoiled her. "My dear," he had told Lady Nighten, "if taking her with me to chambers, or to my office to hear debate and reasoning among the best minds of our time is spoiling a child...by all means, I should see all England's school-aged children spoiled so!"

And of course Miranda had laughed, her perfect, warmly enchanting laugh reserved only for his (few- and far-between) foibles.

In retrospect he ought to have displayed more eccentricity if it would have won him more of that precious laughter.

He lifted the photo up, placing it in a row with photos he had also selected of his son, Clem, and Lady Nighten, his beloved wife. All of them - how could it be? All three, his precious family entire, dead. Lost to him.

"Do you not miss them some, Eva? Your mistress, the young master and Lady Marion? Tell me you do." He spoke out to Eva Heindl who had been at making and pouring his afternoon tea.

"Certainly, my lord," she agreed with him. "I miss the family, as do we all. But _Marion_," she stepped to the row of photos he had assembled like plots in a cemetery and withdrew Marion's, "Lady Marion will be home before nightfall, Sir Edward. She has but stepped out to do a bit of shopping."

He looked at Eva. She was such a charming girl. A peaceful companion, really. How nice, how relieving, how reassuring to know that Marion would soon be home.

After Eva returned it to his hand, he brushed his thumbnail over the photograph he had been contemplating. _Brutus! He recalled in a flash. Of course! That foolish little Maltese had been named Brutus_.

* * *

**SARK -** Djak eyed Stephen as the blind man set about making part of the evening meal. He moved with an unexpected grace and confidant carriage about his own kitchen, knowing where everything needed was, every ingredient or utensil for the appointed task. But her eyes became little more than slits each time his hands came in contact with the food to be served. As he measured milk into a glass, his first finger bent over the lip to inform him when it was nearly full. As he cut potatoes, his hands were constantly rubbing and playing across the pieces on the cutting surface to show him how well he progressed in that work. Necessary flour was measured by its weight in his bare hands, added to the mixture he was stirring in just the same way.

Wills sat across the table from Djak, his own eyes as keenly attuned to hers as were hers to watching Stephen. He could not figure why she might be so cross at the sight of their generous host concocting them what was sure to be a very filling, well-made supper.

If he were to take, as Robin insisted, this person, this _girl_, for his liver, he needed to understand her. Her feelings in this instance should not be such a conundrum to him.

Carter, seated beside Djak on the long bench pulled up to table, had not taken notice of the Gypsy boy's particular attentiveness to Stephen, but he could not mistake the intense concentration Wills Reddy was directing the boy's way.

Carter turned to Djak and asked a brief, three word question. Getting a longer answer, he turned to Wills, to sort it out for him. "He's upset by how much the _staretz_ is touching the food with his hands."

Wills' look did not lighten but a little at this intended illumination.

Carter continued, "The Rom, they have very set rules where cleanliness is concerned. Even in a kitchen, even with what would be to us clean hands, for them it is almost a religious commitment, their adherence to their particular purity laws."

"So even though Stephen is _Gadjo_," Wills asked, using a new word from his syllabary, "non-Romany, this necessary use of his hands makes Djak disrespect him?"

Carter turned and asked another question of the boy, whose eyes still did not stray from Stephen and his work. "No," Carter replied. "He does not disrespect the _staretz_, only, would prefer to prepare his own food."

"What's that you keep sayin'? Star-Etts?" Royston asked, from his post monitoring the barnyard from the window, like them all, anxious to sight Allen returning with news.

"_Staretz_," Carter considered. "It's a word...a Russian word for, someone with a great degree of moral authority. A holy man."

"Well, little man's got that right, hasn't he?" John asked, eyeing the Gypsy.

"Got more than that, looks like, lads," Robin sang out, having circled 'round to the back of Djak, and seeing a peculiar form there under the large shirt of Wills' she now wore.

Before Djak knew she was the subject of her _rom baro_'s speech, he had his hand down the collar and back of the shirt, and had plucked, of all things, a small leather-bound book from within. Quickly, but he held it too high out of her grasp, she tried to snatch it back.

Wills sighed, certain she would never be taught not to take things that weren't hers.

Carter suppressed a chuckle, unable to keep himself from being charmed by the boy's persistently acquisitive fingers. Having been a prisoner himself, in more than one war, he knew better than the rest the at-times deep desperation in such situations. The feeling of needing something of one's own, or the despair of not being able to get, find, borrow, or beg the one thing (whether it was paper, string, or a single match) that one required. He found himself a little taken with this boy's way of stockpiling odds and ends for the uncertain future. Certainly he would have found it hard to take the kid to task over it. "La Salle himself has spoken that what is his is the boy's as well," Carter defended the boy's action to the others.

"Aye," Robin (for the very first time) agreed with him. He had the small book cracked open, his eyes to the page. "But I think in this matter Stephen might likely change his mind."

"What matter is that, Robin?" Stephen asked, wiping his hands on a dishtowel.

"This would appear to be property of your wife."

"What?" the former rector's hands immediately extended into the empty air directly in front of him to receive the item, his hands trailing along the binding, and the unadorned cover.

Robin helpfully explained what he had seen of its contents. "'Twould appear our Gypsy boy has located your Louise's diary."

"Were there more?" Stephen asked, his face showing anticipation he made no effort to conceal. "Many more?"

Carter looked at Wills, who attempted to ask Djak the simple question in Romany.

"Djak found ten, possibly more just like it." Wills had steered away from the use of pronouns, so easily mis-said. Taking a breath, he used one here, "he took this one, he says, because it had the most blank pages."

Stephen's hands shot to the spine, trying to discern the non-Braille numerals stamped there. "What year," he asked, like a dehydrated man begging for water, to any who would answer. "What year?"

Robin brought his hand to still La Salle's, removing the blind man's to slightly lower on the spine so that he might see and report what the stamped golden numbers read. "Nineteen-forty," Robin announced, though all in the room had already suspected it.

"John," Stephen called out to the unit's medic, where he sat in his usual place, also looking out the window, grimly anxious, never one to fully trust another's standing watch. "John - read a page. February. Read something in February."

Robin extended the book to John, who took it, not at all certain as to why he was called upon to read aloud.

The small volume looked no larger than a checkbook in John's hands. The handwriting within proved straight and legible, the kind that would've gotten high marks at any grammar school. It curled with a woman's touch, and he found himself almost to the point of burying his nose for an instant to scent the journal's pages, but stopped himself just in time. He readjusted his proximity to the page, trying to cover for his instinctual behavior by making as though his eyes were adjusting to the small script. "_17 February,_" he began, "_cooler than last year's winter_..." The entry went on to detail mundane happenings on the farm, an inventory of eggs, milk, comments on the progress of cheeses aging, which cows were fresh for breeding and the like, with a few personal sentences at the end.

Upon listening to it (the supper forgotten, the outside world forgotten) Stephen's face had become nearly beatific.

"Without intending to," Carter murmured to Djak, "you have done a good thing. These are the writing of the _staretz_'s deported wife. You have made him very happy."

Djak inclined her head for a moment, accepting the unexpected praise, and followed it quickly with a question. "Who then," she asked pragmatically, "is to have the _blank_ pages?"

The boy's surprising response almost knocked Carter off the bench they occupied. "If you want paper so badly," he promised, working to suppress signs of humor, "I'll speak to them about finding you some. _After_ you show the _rom baro_ where the other volumes are located."

"Well, I do not want the others," Djak informed him. "They are all quite full of writing."

"Naturally," Carter agreed. "You will be the only one disappointed by that, I assure you." A smile crept slowly across his lips, and he gave up fighting against it.

At the reading of Louise La Salle's small journal, its brief, unexciting entry, the room had taken on a momentary (doubtless imagined) glow. Though the men of the unit had never met her, though there were no photographs or drawings of Madame La Salle to be found in the house, her home nonetheless retained something of her, in the arrangement of her few knick-knacks, the knitted cozies and handmade lace, the table runners and other things she had handcrafted for her home. And of course, in the strong memory her husband carried of her.

They stayed in this house, using her things, living, to some degree, the life she had been forced to abandon. They were a society of men, missing home, missing that feminine something that seemed to them all to delineate what 'home' meant.

Robin (the least acquainted of them with such a concept of 'home') was the first to break the snug silence and speak, his mind to Mitch, to Marion, to twenty-thousand other present-day concerns. "Nineteen-forty," he echoed, catching Wills' eye. "Would that _I_ could turn back time so easily."

A moment passed, Wills holding his gaze. "Wait," he asked. "Say that again."

"What?" Robin repeated, "'would that I could turn back time'?"

"Yeah," said Wills. "Ask me again later. I think you have given me an idea." The communication officer's brows knit together in thought, and he rose to plate his portion of the supper, removing himself from the others to another, quieter room that he might better think out and plan his potential idea.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** You will find the quoted passage in the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 11, verses 23-25.  
Songs, Books, and Films have been updated in my Author's Profile, now current through Chapter 13. (Of course, no songs were used in _this_ chapter...) 


	15. Italian Front  Forgiveness and Fists

**ITALY - American 5th Army Infantry - Advancing, North of Naples, bound for Gustav Line -** "What'n tarnation am I lookin' at this for?" Captain Fred Otto exclaimed. It was somewhat unusual for dead bodies to be brought directly into command tents.

"Cap'n, Sir, found this limey just outside the boundaries of the last skirmish, Sir," the staff sergeant who accompanied the corpse on the stretcher explained.

The man indeed, appeared to be British in derivation, his insignia worn under the reverse of his (non-uniform) shirt collar. So, SIS most likely; escaped POW, possibly.

"What's he doin' in civvies?" Otto asked.

"Dunno, Sir."

"And why'm'I looking at him, and not his own people?"

The staff sergeant nodded to one of the stretcher-bearers who gently peeled back the lapel of the Brit's outer coat - through the front of which he had been shot dead - revealing a bulky package that had taken on more than its share of the man's lifeblood. Even so, the writing on the (originally) brown packing paper was yet boldly legible: _Captain Fred Otto, US 5th Army_, and then the number of his specific infantry division as additional distinction.

Fred let out with a colorful swear, accepting the damp packet into his hands. He had it open momentarily, all the proof he needed that the gent had been British Intelligence in his two, now also bloodied, hands.

'_Otto_,' the note enclosed began, '_please accept these, somewhat dubiously knitted by my mother-in-law, formerly known to the public as the Baroness Woodvale, now, I am told, at the local canteen where she has volunteered her time (and sketchy talent for fancy needlecraft) she is more commonly addressed as, 'Edith'. A familiarity with which, I will remark, she has yet to permit me as her son-in-law to employ. Do wear them in the best health. I continue to work on tracking down some of these superior Kentucky cigarettes for you. V for victory, and all that, Stoker_'.

Fred withdrew the pair of hand-knitted over-the-calf socks. They, too, were dismayingly bloodied. With one hand he returned the letter and packaging to the staff sergeant with orders to take it, along with the corpse, to the nearest British field office for their review, in case Stoker had hidden any coded messages for his countrymen within; and orders to encourage the Brits (as he knew they would) to closely search the dead messenger, who may well be yet carrying other, less obvious packets of far-greater importance.

With his other hand he strung up each of the socks on the back of a nearby camp chair to dry out.

_Fall, nineteen-forty-three on the Italian Front_. It would take something far worse than the stain another man's blood to make him turn up his nose at a pair of new, warm socks.

* * *

**SARK -** Of a twilight-to-evening, La Salle's barnyard seemed to call to the unit. Perhaps it was the unspoken fear they each shared that the day might well be coming when they were either incarcerated by their enemy, or forced to hide indoors for fear of imminent discovery. So the open air, the cool air, even, of an October evening coming-on was welcome to the lungs of all.

The path directly up and into the barn, kept free of manure, the earth there grassless and hardened with foot-traffic, tended to be the place they would congregate, some lying on their backs on the ground (some nights on the hay cart pulled out from within for just such a use) to examine the sky and stars, others occupying the flat tops of rolled out casks or barrels as makeshift seats.

Nearly always Robin leaned, never one to sit when he might stand. Tonight, always at least three sets of eyes were attuned to the horizon, each man hoping to sight Allen first.

On such nights the opening order of business usually tended toward lengthy silence. The second, a subdued inventory of what tobacco each member of the unit might currently possess - and in what form.

Ever taking stock of the weather, former sailor Royston, with his preternatural ability called out to the others that the overnight would likely see rain, possibly even a storm or two.

Over by the open barn doors the flier Carter sat, trying to process what his day, his recent escape had wrought. He was in as close a proximity to Oxley as he had ever been for any extended period of time. "Perhaps I should simply let him take a run at me," Carter mused in low tones to the Gypsy boy, whom he had begun to notice was never far from his side.

Djak did not understand the accurate meaning of the idiom. "How so?"

"Well," Carter spoke less guardedly than he would have to someone he felt was his equal, someone he did not presume was a young boy, their conversation in Russian safely untranslatable by the others. "If we fought, say, to the death..."

At this, Djak scoffed, but did not dismiss the notion as a way to settle matters between the two men. "You are hungrier for battle than he is, surely, but he hates you more."

Slowly, Carter responded. "True, I think."

"If his wife were here," Djak assured him, believing it, recalling Marion's no-nonsense handling of Robin, "she would settle him."

"You think?" Carter stifled a smirk. He had not yet gotten around to explaining to the boy that Marion and Oxley were not, in point of fact, wed.

The first sounds of a night in the countryside were coming on, like an orchestra tuning up.

"What's that you two are on about?" John required to know.

Carter's eyes flicked over to where Oxley stood. Easy enough to tell a lie. And yet he didn't. Addressing Robin, _not_ John, he said, "I was telling the boy that you can kill me."

Wills and Royston shifted in their posture. Royston's face flush with the hope of excitement, perhaps a round of fisticuffs - of what might come next. Wills' cautious with dread, but prepared to intervene, his mind torn from its present planning and puzzle-solving.

Oxley's eyes narrowed at Carter's speaking directly to him. "And why would I do that?" Robin asked, coolly.

"If what I have done is so unforgivable to you, so unfathomable, so irredeemable, then do away with me." Carter stood, his arms held out in a type of supplication, of invitation. "No one needs to know I was here." He took a hand and threw it out toward the still seated Gypsy boy, who pulled the long fisherman's knife that had once been Dick Giddons' from somewhere on her person, and laid its grip in Carter's waiting, open palm.

Carter's fingers took quick possession of it, and before even John could make a move to prevent him, he thrust it like a lightning bolt (indeed, with the same authority some unknown god might thrust a lightning bolt) into the hard-packed earth at Robin's feet. Very _near_ to Robin's feet.

Without flinching, without letting his gaze even acknowledge the knife produced for the proposed task, Robin jerked his head to indicate the boy Djak. "And what says the boy of this plan?"

Carter turned his head around to see.

Djak looked up at him, then over to Robin.

Carter shrugged. "His culture would tell him that if we fight and you lose, I am become _rom baro_. Big Man of the clan."

"And _do_ you expect to lose?" John forbiddingly cut in, moving to stand, afraid he might need to alter his original assessment of the RAF pilot as a friendly.

Robin over-spoke him, stepping upon John's unnecessary challenge. "And _your_ culture," he reminded RAF Flight Commander Thomas Carter of his allegiance to His Majesty's forces and their code of conduct, "would tell you that it is a grave crime to attack a superior officer."

Carter knew he had no desire to overthrow Robin, or his authority, only to lance the boil that had been festering between the two of them - one way, or the other. "Very well, I will not fight back. Do what you must. But let there be an end to it here."

At this, Robin cast his head down, hiding his eyes (and therefore his intent) from view.

Wills watched, tense with uncertainty as Robin bent at the waist first, then at the knee, squatting to pry the fisherman's knife out of the earth it gripped. He walked toward Carter and Djak, the knife's point dubiously extended. At the last possible moment, Robin spun the blade about in his hand, like a movie cowboy's six-shooter, offering its handle to the Gypsy boy, who accepted it back without hesitation.

Another step and Robin clasped one of Carter's outstretched hands in his. Robin's look was steady and earnest, but deliberately so, and not without effort. "Mitch," at the name every man present stiffened for a moment, "likes to remind me often that his mother is fond of saying that, '_Holding a resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die_'." Robin ticked his head ever-so-slightly to the side. "So let us shake hands."

They did, though perhaps not a terribly hearty handshake, nor held over-long. At its conclusion, Robin took a place seated on the ground next to Carter and Djak, as if trying to show publicly that he was in harmony with them.

He attempted, succinctly, to explain himself, his erratic incendiary behavior over the last several days. "You did not know who Marion was, of course," he told Carter. "Yet, what was done to her...it was not proper treatment of a non-combatant. Nor of any woman." He looked about to the others of the unit, whose faces showed they concurred. "Yet, _we_ do not forget we are at war here, despite the rolling acreage, the green pastureland, the sea all about us, too large to truly conquer. We each of us," his eyes again flicked about among the unit, "have regrets over actions in which we have taken part - in which we have _imagined_ taking part in our minds - since we joined with the service. We acknowledge your imprisonment as a mitigating circumstance, well aware there is never such a thing as a clean escape, and so as the officer in charge here, I will refrain from taking any punitive measures against you."

'_How odd_,' Carter thought, '_to be addressed so formally and be spoken to of military discipline seated beside one another on the ground in an environment more picnic or late-night spooning than military tribunal_.'

Even with this formal dismissal of any charges against Carter as a soldier, Robin's serious tone did not lighten. "On a personal note, the harm you wrought is not permanent, and Marion herself has forgiven you. I shall try to do the same, though my blood calls to me otherwise." For a moment he chewed at the inside of his lower lip. "It would not usually be so hard for me."

Carter noticed the fingers of Robin's right hand had begun fidgeting as though itching at the air.

"Only, it stings more and more where Marion is concerned, that of late...Gisbonnhoffer is stealing my life." This last sentence was said quietly, not purposefully so that the others might not hear, only, somewhat confessionally.

Clear-eyed, his eyes with a softer cast for Robin than for the German officer referenced in Oxley's words, Thomas Carter replied, cool and collected, and with complete conviction, the man who had ceased counting his own kills two years prior declared: "Then you must not let him."

* * *

The debate raged on.

"What're ye gonna do, then? Kill him?" John demanded, his ire raised at Carter's clearly aggression-minded statement. "Think of the Islanders! The reprisals we've already seen!"

"Yeah," Wills agreed, "but when Carter killed that Jerry he didn't know - even we didn't know - that reprisals (and such severe ones) were to be levied upon the civilian population."

"Come now," Robin spoke. "I cannot believe a soldier killing another soldier in a war is unjustified. Because the Kommandant - the entire Reich - is evil, is morally corrupt, does not make our actions on behalf of Carter - " it was the first time he had freely used the man's name, "nor his own actions on behalf of preserving his life and freedom - immoral. It is _war_. We cannot be cowed in the face of our enemies. If so, they have beaten us by threats, and we fail in our mission."

"But we _don't_ seek out Jerries to massacre..." Royston reminded, staunchly. "...Even if they are going to marry Lady Marion." He tried to avoid Robin's eye-line at his declaration of this.

"And we don't pick fights without damn fine reasons..." John added.

"And guaranteed victories upon their conclusion," Wills noted, "unless those fights come to us."

Carter had turned to explain to the curious Djak what twist the conversation had taken.

"What says Djak?" Wills asked, keen to understand the girl's bent of mind.

Carter paused and translated, "he says the Jerries like to kill, and that they will find reasons and new ways to do so without regard to what your unit does."

"He may well be right," John gruffly agreed, "but 'tis no small thing to walk about with the potential of twenty-five innocent souls on one's conscience if one but once follows their training and shoots straight."

Robin asked their newest addition to weigh in. "And you, Carter, what say you?"

Carter did not hesitate, and found no reason within himself to need to review or alter his feelings on the matter. "I do not believe that non-combatants truly exist. The very smallest of children, perhaps. For anyone else with the ability to understand the present conflict, the title is a misnomer. Each fights, each opposes, as their allegiances - as their hearts - tell them."

At this bald, rather shocking statement of how he saw the world, all eyes were on him, save Djak's, who did not know the further nature of the discussion. She began to shout when she saw Allen rattling down the dirt track toward the house and barn, the beater of a bike he had 'borrowed' threatening to collapse before his journey's end.

* * *

Robin encouraged him to tell all. "Quick as you can, Allen, quick as you can!"

Wills agreed. "Details later, we have been waiting forever for news."

Allen had not yet even dismounted the bike before he began to share. "Mitch is at Treeton. Still there. Marion taken back to Guernsey, along with Vaiser's grown daughter what has showed up, who is to be billeted there." Off the bike, letting it drop to the ground. "Geis had told Marion he would release Mitch for her, unharmed, but...he has left Alderney and pursued Marion back to Guernsey and Barnsdale."

Robin took his hand to the back of his neck, and gave himself a good scratching. "So we are in a definite fix. Can you say where he is at the camp?"

"I cannot, no, but I've got Annie on it." Allen tried to take his first truly deep breath to compensate for his exertion over the last thirty minutes. He wished to goodness someone would think to hand him a dipper of water. His eyes snapped up to Robin's. "Told me today she's ready to come out. 'Family keeping her there's dead, now, she's found out. Had to play her a bit to convince her to stay and help with Mitch."

"Who's this Annie?" Carter asked, wondering whom their contact was at the camp. "Can she be trusted?"

"Anya Grig-somethin', you know - Geis' secretary - got you out, didn't she?"

No one present saw it coming, the fist that barreled into Allen Dale's jaw, followed quickly by a second, only somewhat less fast-flying than the first.

Allen's neck snapped back from the unexpected (seemingly un-warranted) blow. He fell back, and would have smacked the ground had he not flopped into Royston first. Royston held Allen up, but only barely, Allen just on the cusp on consciousness.

Carter surged, but John was ready this time, and had the flier's dominant arm in a hold, preventing further physical violence.

"You ass," Carter shouted, bouncing like a boxer, up and down on the balls of his feet, ready for the round two bell. "You simpleton bastard," he bellowed at Allen, just returning to fully knowing where he was.

Carter lunged against the leverage of John upon his arm, ignoring the pain, but still could not get free to renew his assault on Allen. "He rapes her," Carter had eyes for no one but Allen as he growled to him what Anya's life at Treeton was like. "He humiliates and assaults her daily. And you have 'played her a bit'," he spat it like venom, "so that she might condemn herself further to his ceaseless abuse?"

John, worried Carter might well let him fracture his arm, decided Carter needed some necessary cooling off, and force-marched him away from where they were gathered, but not before Carter shot off some rapid Russian to Djak.

Standing to follow after John and Carter, she paused for a moment where Royston still supported an unsteady Allen, and cast her dark eyes upon him like she was mixing potions for a powerful hex. With a great hocking noise she spat her disgust in his direction, due to her height missing his face, but getting her point across despite the barriers of language.

"I didn't know," Allen, finding his voice protested several times. "I didn't know! She never said. I didn't know," the last calling of it was loud, as though he hoped the wind might carry his ignorance of the matter to where John had taken Carter.

"Go after them," Robin told Royston.

"I've figured it out," Wills offered, deliberately going entirely off-topic, as he and Allen and Robin were all that was left in the barnyard.

"Figured what out?" asked Allen, even this troubling news about Annie and his unwitting actions toward her unable to dim his naturally voracious curiosity.

"Well, we need a way to get messages to Marion, right?"

"Right," Robin agreed.

"So, if my calculations are right, and you _might_ visit Barnsdale to check for certain...and you can see Le Moulin here on Sark from the Barnsdale roof, I believe I can rig a way, with the power of John at the gears, to make it turn in the opposite direction of the prevailing wind. The sails, after all, are long missing, only the narrowest wood of the vanes is left."

"It's the highest point on Sark, yeah?" Allen asked.

"On the Guernsey bailiwick entire, Stephen says," Robin corrected, his face keen with interest.

"And no one is ever truly looking at it, it's so broken down and long-abandoned," Wills continued to lay out his logic. "One might even expect the vanes to turn somewhat every now and then in a wind."

Robin smirked confidently. "But not counter."

"Yes." Wills smiled.

"Bit like turning back time, that," Allen approved, his jaw nearly regaining feeling in it.

Robin clapped Wills on the back. "You must start your work tomorrow. Allen and I will carry a spyglass to the Nightwatch tonight. Now go and help sort out your boy and his friend." He stepped over toward Wills to be closer when he added, "find out what you can from Carter, and the boy Djak about this Anya's situation. But bring your findings straight to me, and tell the other lads not to mention it again. We will sort this. And Mitch. And Marion."

"I never doubted it," Wills agreed, figures and measurements, tools and supplies swirling in his head as he set off into the now-full evening in search of the others.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:**I did not make up the quote of Mitch's mother's. I cannot, however, recall where I heard it/wrote it down from (yes, Klaus, I, too, have a _Commonplace Book_). So just take this note as "not mine, don't recall whose".  
**Disclaimer:** I do not know for certain which direction Le Moulin faces. For the purposes of our story, it faces in the direction of Guernsey and, more importantly, the Barnsdale estate. 


	16. Barnsdale Stables

**GUERNSEY - Barnsdale Estate -** It was after dinner, the day's light dying away. Marion had managed to skip the meal at-table, though it grieved her not to share the time with her father, in whose eyes she seemed again to be familiar. It had not been too difficult to hole up in her room and steal further welcome sleep, momentary oblivion.

She preferred to avoid Geis at all costs, his attentions and attempts at comfort and gentleness particularly unwelcome against her skin, about her person, at this time. He would not have gone unentertained, though. She assured herself that in her absence she could not have been too much missed, as Eleri in all her post-shopping delight had dressed for the meal.

Thankfully, Allen Dale had left for his work driving on Alderney, eliminating any further need to worry about him and his behavior toward her, or Fraulein Vaiser.

Up now from her rest, and out walking through the park in the fading light of evening, Marion thought of the new curfews in place, demanding Islanders not leave their homes after six o'clock p.m. until the morning. How the ridiculous stipulation extended even to moving about one's own property.

She found herself for a moment thinking of Sark, of La Salle's holding there. Wondering if such laws impeded its current occupants from making nighttime trips to the separate, free-standing lavatory. Well, perhaps such rules were not so much followed at La Salle's. But surely, how they must unfortunately curb and complicate the behavior and lives of other Islanders.

Here at Barnsdale, under Geis' oversight, she never feared being outdoors during sensible hours, knowing any soldiers that accompanied him on his visits were informed to allow her father and her as free a rein as possible.

The Nightwatch, of course, was another matter entirely. Far more difficult to explain being far afield of the house in the wee smalls if one were caught or sighted than simply being out on an evening walk to take in the sea breeze.

She made a note to ask Eva sometime how the Heindl family dealt with the Germans' strictures, and still managed trips to their also detached lavatory, and properly tending their few animals.

She had arrived at the horse barn, the building a good deal away from the far-newer carriage house (her mother's addition) with its agreeably appointed chauffeur's quarters on the second floor. The distance necessary, especially when it was first built and used, to keep the startling noises of automobiles well away from spooking the animals.

The chauffeur's quarters, now occupied by Geis' men. His 'guards', she knew he thought of them as. They were so young, she sometimes noticed; mere boys, still able to be awed at the size of the estate, the fact they were in uniform, allowed to wield their guns. Because they slept there beyond the house-proper, and took their meals in the kitchens around staff, she knew little of them, only occasionally learning one of their names.

When Geis was not present, their watching of the estate and tending to of their duties was generally quite lax, and during those times she rarely, if ever, felt their eyes watching her, or paying mind at all to anything that did not immediately concern them occurring on the estate. But it did pop into her head that with the new addition of Eleri the Kommandant might likely task more guards to Barnsdale. Either way, such young men, often lonely for companionship, would prove a future challenge (in the face of the irrepressible Eleri's occupancy) to surmount.

Marion entered the stone barn, her mind immediately more restful at the (to her) calming atmosphere of horses stabled for the night, shifting in their stalls as they prepared for rest. It was an old edifice, added onto several times over many decades, its roof still thatched as in the old way, making it a building more in harmony with the many simpler provincial structures of the island than the doughty English neo-Classical architecture that was Barnsdale house.

It brought to mind something of Mr. Thornton's nearby cottage just beyond the estate's edge, though she had not visited him there in many long months. His home always striking her as cozy and inviting, for all that it could have been no larger than several hundred square feet (less than the size of her mother's Barnsdale suite).

Marion found her way to their grey Percheron Dovecote, the gentlest of their mounts (Gypsum, as a rule, too high-strung for cuddling), always willing to have anyone, but particularly Marion, lay across her massive draft horse flank without protesting.

Marion lay her head there, feeling the horse's rise and fall of breath, smelling the comforting scent of horse and harness leather. She closed her eyes, her hand wishing it were nearer a currycomb, in the absence of such using the tips of her fingers to mimic that action, stroking back and again back in the same, soothing direction of horse's coat.

If she had thought her recently so-rattled bones might stand the strain, she would have mounted her bareback and gone for a ride. Anything to feel a moment of freedom, of release, however false.

Never much one for outright singing, she found herself humming softly, uncertain whether she did so more for Dovecote, or herself. It was a song Freddy had taught her, one he was fond of even when it was not Derby Day.

"_Weep no more my ladies_," she hummed, only thinking of the tune's accompanying words, "_oh, weep no more today. We will sing one song for my old Kentucky home, for my old Kentucky home so far away_."

What a melancholy chorus, its verse far brighter. Her mind wondered about Fred for a moment. Was he 'so far away' from that home of his, the horses and life he loved best? Certainly she didnt like to imagine him so. She refused. Unsuccessful riverboat gamblers did not sign up to go off to war. They were far too busy managing their own debts to take up arms against opponents any further away than the opposite side of a gaming table.

It was the distant sound of her father moving about on the stone promenade overlooking the park where he often smoked after dinner that brought her head up, opened her eyes from the stolen moment of peaceful contemplation.

Marion held back her own startled response when upon opening them she saw that she was not, in fact, alone, but that Geis was standing just beyond the stall's half-door, his eyes narrowed, intently watching her.

* * *

He was not much one for barns, as a rule. At home in the Schwarzwald the Gisbonnhoffer family were known for merchants, respected sellers of dry goods. And always more apt to use an auto, or delivery truck, when others less progress-minded might still board a horse and cart.

But he had seen Marion, from the distance at which he had shadowed her from the house, make her way here, and had followed.

Interestingly she had sought out the large and powerful horse-of-all-work in its stall, not the mare she usually chose when she rode. He watched on as she had softly, almost as though afraid of waking anyone, let herself into the stall.

She carried no treats for the horse that he could see, no gift to offer it. Presently she had lain down her head (her uninjured cheek) upon the horse's immense side and begun to pet it with the most tender of caresses. It was not long before he thought he caught something, even, of her humming to the animal as though meaning to comfort and soothe it.

His mind snagged on this oddity. The horse had not seemed distressed when Marion had sought it out, nor did it seem distressed now. It was, in point of fact, utterly placid. Docile to the point that it might, actually, be sleeping. So why the need to treat it so? To offer such special attentions, such kind, soft sounds and gentle touches. It was an animal - and one meant for a life of work, at that. _What could it possibly understand of receiving such delicate care? Such loving attentions?_

Why would she choose to waste these things on it so?

Sir Edward noised about on the house's raised stone promenade, and at the sound Marion had opened her eyes and spotted him just outside the stall she occupied with the horse.

"You did not come to dinner," Geis said in parentally reproachful salutation. "I trust you did eat something?"

She did not lift her cheek away from the side of the great beast. "I have not much been hungry."

"No." He meant to agree. "I mean, yes. I know. You ought to be resting." He could not withhold suspicion from his tone, always ready to believe a slight. "And yet you are here, as though you are avoiding the house. Avoiding me."

"You know the Kommandant ordered me to accompany his daughter - "

"Yes, of course." He tried to answer her bristly tone reasonably. "But I am able now to be at Barnsdale so little." He attempted a small flirt, accompanied by an eighth of a smile. "Can you fault me for wishing to spend every spare moment with you?"

"No. I cannot fault you for _that_."

His brow clouded. "Marion, what is it?"

Pulling away from the beast's flank, her words came out crisp but rushed, as though she must say them or suffer some internal punishment from holding them in. "I thought perhaps you were a better man. You are clearly not the man I thought you to be," she told him, her hands shaking as they dug into her pocket for the telegrams folded there. Under her breath she added, "not that I had set the bar so very high."

"How can you mean?" He stepped to the stall's closed half-door, his hand to the hasp's pin to open it and walk in. "In what way have I disappointed you?"

"In _every_ way," she told him, beginning to read in her flawless home-tutored German the message from his wife, Greta. The final words she nearly spat, such was her effort to get them out. "I am glad to have lost my betrothal ring. I would have felt dishonest wearing it."

It actually took Geis a moment to place what he was hearing. At first he did not recognize the birthday message, as though it were meant for someone else. Then, the realization came crashing down that he had been found out. Before he could ask Marion in knee-jerk reaction where she had gotten hold of the document, she segued into reading aloud the eloquent reply to it he had required Diefortner to draft and send.

In a sort of frozen horror he watched her face as she seemed near tears, the contractions of muscles in her cheeks clearly causing pain from its pulling at her stitches.

"Marion," he fumbled with the stall door's fastener. "Marion," he cried out, trying to get to her, the panicky timbre of his voice upsetting the barn's equine residents.

"No," she said, something unusually defiant in her face now, something he had never seen before. "What was your plan? To trick me? To deceive me until it was too late?" She gestured with the crumpled papers of the telegrams. "Or simply, 'til death do we part'?"

He pleaded, not prepared for this moment, saying the first things that came to his mind. Whatever it would take to assure her of his feelings. "They are nothing to me, Marion," he tried to explain his family behind in the Fatherland. "_Nothing_. Nothing holds meaning without you."

"Nothing?" she gasped, her own tones milder than his in respect to the horses, her facial expression filling in where loud and abrupt tones prove disruptive. "Your own children," at this she shook, "and you say they mean _nothing_? And what of the child we would have had, Geis? What of your bastards got upon me? Would they also have been _nothing_ to you?"

"No - I - did not mean it that way. I will pursue a divorce, certainly. I was already in the process," he lied, his family once seeming so far-off, as if they had existed only in a dream, now in this moment of his unmasking starkly real. "You will have me, _then_, yes? Your own parents, after all are..."

Like stomping her foot on an insect, she over-spoke his words. "Do _not_ ever presume to think you know my feelings on the matter of my parents' relationship. And do _not_ assume that I approve of what they have done, or that I would consider doing the same." Her boldness was so complete, her anger blossoming in a way he had never beheld. In a moment it turned into something equally distressing to him, deep sorrow and regret coming from her. "I would have married you, Geis. I would have vowed to keep myself only to you - before you, before whatever corrupt priest you had found to fake the ceremony - before God. And I would have done it!"

His chin went up as his eyes shot heavenward and then closed at her pronouncement. "Come out, Marion," he begged her leave the horse stall, "come out."

He felt shot through the heart, pinned to the wall like a butterfly specimen meant for display. He could feel how clearly she saw him, his actions. He could barely breathe at the intoxicating nature of what she had shared that she had meant to do, voicing the very wholehearted sincerity of commitment with which he had so hoped she might approach their wedding. Lost to him now. Made null, void by his own actions.

He knew how she must've gotten hold of the papers. Their entire 'discovery' smacked of Diefortner acting on orders of the Kommandant. Doubtless the ambitious adjutant had embellished the telegram reply he had been ordered to write to play further into the Kommandant's plot.

Almost certainly the Kommandant had acted the horrified, equally betrayed friend upon Marion sharing the news of what she had found.

"You lied to me," Marion told him, her eyes like two immoveable moonstones. "I had assumed your word was as good as truth, your promises to be trusted. You clearly thought my own honor, my own ability to truly choose, did not matter."

"Please," he begged her, "please." He had had no time to prepare a defense for his behavior.

"No, Geis," she told him, denial about her like an impenetrable cloak. "Everything is back in its box."

He noticed her fisted hand as she spoke, the crescent shapes of her nails forcefully pressing into the palm's flesh in her barely-caged fury. "You are a complete stranger to me. I have clearly never even known you to begin with."

The sound of Sir Edward coughing to clear his throat came to them on the breeze from off the promenade.

The sound of it bit into Marion's chest like bitterest chill. _What was she doing?_ She had found she no longer cared what her actions, her outburst, might mean for her, but what might it mean for her father? His health? His very life?

"I accept your anger," Geis declared, seizing the moment wherein she had fallen silent. "I accept your viewing our engagement as broken. But please..." He knew he was begging. He was not a man used to begging. Not a man given to displays of acknowledging another ever had the upper hand, even when, as with the Kommandant, they did. Certainly such sniveling men did not advance in the ranks. He had spent his mature life creating an aura of sanguine competence, of to-be-perceived-as deserved pride. Yet he was prepared in that moment to do anything in order to win her back, to re-acquire anything of her favor.

He was a man deserted by the smug self-importance that had for the most part steered his adult life. He was made small in front of her, humiliated, but willingly. "...Can we not start again...as friends, at least? Will you not take my hand, accept my admission of guilt in keeping this from you?" Had she been able to see him behind the stall's half-door, where he still stood without, he might have gone to one knee. "Will you not understand that my feelings for you are such - have ever been such from the moment I met you that day that - "

She did not let him finish. Her expression still wore the remains of her outrage, but in her final words he scrabbled for, and found, hope, but also, for the moment, a dismissal.

"We will never find ourselves in this situation again." Marion walked to the half-door, from practice manipulating the hasp closure with one hand, and sidling out the stall's entrance (which he more than half-occupied), showing she held no fear (nor interest) in close physical contact with him. Without speaking further she walked away from him, out into the early night.

For the first time, he knew better than to follow her.

**...TBC...**


	17. Windmill Wooing  FB 1939 LONDON and NYC

**GUERNSEY - Barnsdale windmill - 2:15 a.m. -** Marion set down the needle to engage the 78rpm and send its verboten sounds out over the Nightwatch airwaves. Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra swung out on "_Take the 'A' Train_".

All about her she noticed the growing amount of space in the half-cellar, her precious stores against the privation of the Occupation diminishing. Fewer barrels, fewer jars. So much here distributed by her in the last months of ever-increasing hardship for Islanders. She thought of how in the past each supply, each treasured piece of her stash had stood in her mind as a reason to tolerate Geis, to go through with the promise she had given him. She had believed that if she could take that distasteful future and bend it to her will, her desire to spread charity, spread hope among the populace...perhaps it could be justified. Perhaps she could hate herself less for it.

And so what had today wrought? A ridiculous morning with Eleri 'shopping' in St. Peter Port. (Although, Marion recalled, perhaps an unexplored possibility to do some good on a medical front at Ginny Glasson's canny suggestion.) An afternoon sacked out in her bed. And an evening...an evening wherein she had set about emotionally eviscerating the most powerful man in her immediate world.

_Until Father had coughed_. If Marion had been of a more sardonic and jaded bent she might have smirked. _A slight compression of the lungs, a throaty expulsion of air_. All it had taken for her to feel, quite strongly, the end of her lead rope. To remind her to heel. That what she did had consequences she was not prepared to pay. Or rather, that she was not prepared for _him_ to pay.

It broke her heart to imagine Sir Edward put out of Barnsdale, or worse, imprisoned, oblivious as to why he was being mistreated, in proximity to nothing familiar, not family, not staff, not surroundings, not, even, respect he had known his life entire.

To imagine _herself_ put out of Barnsdale...another matter entirely. A welcome dismissal, she could almost believe. Freedom from chains and expectations, from Occupation-made masks threatening to fuse to one's true self. But for Edward, she would disappear...somehow.

A child's dream, she knew...invisibility. On these islands, during this time. She had told Robin as much, though he did not wish to hear her.

She thought again of the dressing-down she had given Geis, of how, at that portentous cough of her father's, some of what she had wished to say seemed to stick quite dryly within her throat, still glued there, unsaid, these long hours later.

"And there we've heard, Mr. Hitler," she sometimes like to pretend as though Geis' Fuehrer was a listener, addressing him directly, "Chick Webb and his orchestra perform '_Stompin' at the Savoy_', which you will recognize refers to the renown Savoy Ballroom in New York's Harlem, also known as 'The Track'. It was Mr. Webb who introduced the world to a wonderful Negro singer in Miss Ella Fitzgerald. That particular instrumental was followed by "_Take the 'A' Train_", named for the New York City," she swallowed back 'tube' before dangerously slipping up, "subway line that travels non-stop from midtown to Harlem."

She clicked the mike's transmit button closed, and proceeded to spin the next record. A breeze seemed to have crept down the unlit stairs, stirring the air of the so rarely disturbed half-cellar. At the accompanying sound of Robin's voice in the dark Marion did not (though his presence was unexpected) even stiffen in surprise.

"The Nightwatch speaks of these places as though she has been there," he said, stepping to the edge of the small pool of light her lantern threw upon the uneven flagstone floor. "I forget sometimes that she is so well-traveled."

Marion looked at him. At what she could see of him in the dark: ivy cap, oversized dogtooth jacket, the lapels fraying. "_She_ does not," Marion assured him, speaking of herself in third person.

"And so you have been there? To Harlem, the Savoy Ballroom?" he asked, "...with the Mertons?"

"Yes," she replied truthfully, though with a hesitance that surprised herself. "Before you were dead, and then, after." Her eyes would not stay on his. "But not with the Mertons."

"No," Robin shook his head circumspectly. "Sir Walter and his wife would not likely frequent such...nightclubs, one supposes." His eyebrows steepled in a look equal parts hangdog and warily curious. "Is it common in America for single girls to do so? Travel about New York City's subway, its boroughs and nightclubs, alone? Without escort or chaperone?"

"No," she told him, without trying to conceal the truth. "Not alone."

He chewed a bit on his lip. "And if I were to ask if you had stepped out on the sly with young Susie Merton as a lark?"

She shook her head.

"No," he agreed with regret, his assumption confirmed.

"Come, and sit," she encouraged him, showing him a nearby crate just beside her of similar height to the one she occupied.

He ringed the table that held the lantern, microphone and record player, careful not to trip over any wires, and accepted the offered seat at her side, his expression still tinted with guilt and regret.

Without him asking, she switched her hips just so, until she was cattycorner to him, her back fitted between the divot well where his collarbone extended out into shoulder. At this angle their height was very alike. The fit of their two bodies together as effortless as always.

He had not offered himself for such a pillow, but he did nothing to complain at her unexpected, snug proximity. His nose breathed the scent of her hair, hidden beneath a printed headscarf.

The still-new-to-her scratch of his beard tickled at the base of her now-exposed neck, her own hair usually covering that sensitive area.

His hand came up toward her injured cheek as though instinctually. He did not make actual contact with her hurt. "See," he told her, referencing the visible stitching of the German doctor on Alderney, a small scissors' prick where she had startled just as the man had been tying off. "Even when they try to help, they hurt you."

Marion said nothing. She could not see anything of him as she sat so closely against him. But she could feel his breathing, could smell something about him that spoke of life. Of Robin. Even as the not-original-to-him dogtooth coat's scent, the fragrance of ocean and fruits de mer, were not things she had ever before attributed to him, nor things of which she had any past memories to associate with him.

As their eyes looked off into the same direction, at the patch of night sky visible through the doorless cellar entry at the top of the steep stairs, Robin broke the soft silence of intimate contact that had sprung up between them. "What's it like," he asked, never having been there himself, "New York?"

Marion did not have to think long to answer. Referencing the record she had spinning just now, playing where they could hear it, "It's Gershwin," she told him, wagging her head in wonder that it could be parsed out so easily. "It's _Rhapsody In Blue_."

* * *

**1939 - Late Fall - New York City - Harbor Pier 59 -** She should have had questions to ask Freddy of what he claimed was the best way home - across the Atlantic - he had been able to find for her. But she had had so few _answerable_ questions in the days - nearly three weeks - since their visit to the British Consulate.

Three days ago he had taken a train out to Long Island, and the Belmont Park Race Track. She had declined to share the trip. Apparently it had been a fruitful one on several fronts, and he had met up with an old acquaintance.

When Fred had said she was to go today, she packed, she paid her hotel bill, directed one of the many restaurants at the Waldorf-Astoria to prepare a sack lunch for her, and followed him into a waiting cab.

Packing had seemed so strange; looking at clothes, gifts she had bought for her family in the time away - things like her record collection (quite swelled with albums from her time in America) that would have once been so very, very dear to her now seeming...unimportant. _Why pack? Why take anything?_ None of it mattered. Clothes of any sort could be gotten anywhere. Gifts seemed to represent happier times, hopeful reunions, the most important of which she would never experience. Her and Beau's equestrian awards and once-dear-to-her newspaper clippings of their triumphs seemed like hard-to-explain children of an unwise affair. And records, music...a pastime (once, a passion) that seemed now to stir her not a bit. Not even the saddest of songs.

Truly, she had packed for Fred's sake. To help him feel some sense of normalcy about her before he set her on a ship (she assumed it would be a ship of some ilk) bound for England, possibly not to arrive - nor return to America. Crossings in the current world climate, Europe at war, were perilous at best. Deadly at worst.

He had not tried to argue her out of going. Fred was never much one to believe he had what it took to change her mind, once set, on any subject. He had, instead, thrown heart and soul into locating some sort of passage, however dodgy.

"Wish't'goodness I could go with y'all," he told her. "But Lucky George'll have none of me, unless we're throwing dice. 'Bout all I could do to get him to take you on." He threw a sidelong glance at her where she shared the backseat of the cab with him. "He likes women, though. The prettier the better. Only," he warned, "stay in your cabin as much as possible."

"You don't trust him?" she asked, more conversationally than curiously. Curiosity had long abandoned her.

"Trust him?" he half-snorted mid-inhale, smoke billowing out of his nostrils. "That sorry old ex-rum runner? Thing is, Sugar, anyone we can find to agree to take you home is exactly that: _un_-trustworthy. Lucky George is better than some. But he's not your friend."

They were close to arriving at the location he had directed the cab to. Fred reached into his suit coat and pulled out an embarrassing wad of American cash. "Not your friend, nor mine. Give him a third now. The next when you know you've come halfway. The rest _only_ when you set foot on English soil - or dock. Either should do. Keep it on your person at all other times. And please," he cracked a smile, though she did not return it, "_don't_ gamble more than half of it away with the crew."

Marion accepted the huge bulk of tightly rolled bills. She did not tell him that back home in England she was required almost never to carry cash, the Nightens having everything in their lives billed to them, any incidental monies held by the chauffeur or housekeeper until they were needed. She had never seen this much money - British or American - in her life. Yet he handled it with the casualness of unstarched handkerchiefs.

They exited the taxi, and the driver proceeded to unpack the car's trunk of her baggage.

They were arrived at the agreed-upon slip. The vessel there was rough from use, more so than mere travel might be responsible for. Much about it smacked of disrepair. The half that did not smack of numerous rough crossings made by it. On the upper deck (there was, indeed, _only_ a single deck) she could see a large man. At the sight of Fred on the wharf below he both grimaced _and_ smiled in a combination of what appeared to be anticipation.

She could see the moment had come. "Take this." She pressed an old finishing cloth taken from Beau's leather grooming kit bag into Fred's hand. "It should pay you back for most," she referenced the cash he had just handed to her.

Fred responded to her with a look of confusion, until he felt the weight - the unmistakable weight of Cartier craftsmanship - within the cloth, knotted just as it had been the last time he had been shown it. His eyes registered comprehension of what it held, and concern at her parting with it.

"And cover some of Beau's expenses." Here, at that saying of his name, her voice caught in her throat. "Don't stud him out too much," she ridiculously cautioned the seasoned horse breeder. "Keep his stock valuable." She looked at him, surprised to see something of smile begin about his lips. "He will pay for his keep, I think. When he is healed you must let him have his head at steeplechase again..."

"Marion, honey," he stopped her, not telling her what she already knew - that there was no one in the equestrian world, save her, that would ever be able to ride Saracen's Beau recreationally, much less to competition victories.

"Freddy," she told him, recalling their minds to one night in a Nicholasville barn, "you should have asked me your question again."

At that he flicked what was left of his self-rolled cigarette to the ground and put his hands to both her upper arms, almost as though he might shake her. Instead, he hugged her arms with the firmness of his grip. She could feel the reassuring strength of his hands through her coat and sweater.

How many times these past weeks was she only able to rise in the morning because of Fred's steadfast tending of her? His determined nature and unerring sense of direction, of propulsion, in life?

"No," he told her. "Not now. But someday." He recited a line from a popular song they had danced to after a late supper just the night before. "_Let's say goodbye with a smile, Dear/For awhile, Dear, we must part...We'll meet again/Don't know where, don't know when/But I know we'll meet again some sunny day_."

The large man she had sighted on the deck had descended to them at the level of the pier. She felt his eyes upon her.

"No," the man told Fred, shaking his head. "She'll never do. Fall sick before we've gone ten knots. Best leave her here with you, eh?" There was a decided French Canadian accent to his speech.

Marion nearly spoke up in dissent, until a firmer squeeze of Fred's hand on her arm alerted her that his other hand was already reaching back inside his jacket.

"What's this?" Lucky George asked, feigning ignorance as Fred withdrew another roll of cash, and presented it to him.

"That - in addition to the agreed-upon amount - should take care of any _potential_ medical bills - or inconvenience, I reckon."

The two men stared at one another for a moment.

Lucky George then let out with a piercing whistle, and several stevedores appeared to cart her steamer trunk and luggage up the gangplank. George, however, did not follow them as they retreated to the ship. "Miss - ?" he said.

"Marion," she told him, deliberately leaving off her title and family name at Fred's previous instruction.

"Miss Marion. You have your fare for me?"

She was about to tell him she would be glad to make the first of three payments to him when they were once on board and underway, when the hand of Fred's still upon her upper arm drew her toward him, and she allowed herself to be caught in the full grip of his farewell.

Although he had kissed her many times (and not without her consent) on cheek and forehead, it was the first fully romantic kiss they had ever shared.

She tried to recall what it was to kiss a man. _A man not Robin_. She had done so in the past, of course. But not many men, and not, all told, many times.

Unsurprisingly, she found herself unable to fully engage in the act. Her mind, certainly, was not in it. And Fred had none of (among other things) the abandon with which Robin would have been able to coax her into flouting the so-public venue with such a display of affection.

Fred tasted of...Fred. He seemed more than proficient in the act. And as his friend she wanted - so very much she wanted - to be able to please him. To leave him here on this pier, in America, with a memory of something more than sawdust in his mouth.

She knew that what she would do next was wrong. That it was betraying something within herself. But she took a moment and imagined herself at a very different pier. An English berth, an oceanliner, and a departure where the man she loved had not come to see her off. Had offered no kisses, no flowers, no bon voyage or luck to her, to Beau.

She had wondered often if Robin knew she _had_ seen him, as she had stood on the deck with the Mertons, confetti flying, handkerchiefs waving as they pulled away from the dock, headed out to sea.

Among the crowd gathered far below - his telltale silver roadster nowhere in sight - he stood...with Mitch, of course, at his side. He blew no kisses, he didn't wave or cheer. He glared at the boat like one might at a rival Viking's lit funeral barge.

She wanted to shout to him. To will him to make eye contact with her. But she was far too far above, too distant, and if he had caught sight of her he had finished his gazing by the time she spied him. The Mertons milled about her speaking of dinner and cocktails and whether one might need one's full mink or simply a nice stole once out on the open sea.

She watched Robin, even as the dock retreated from view. _What if she had kissed him in that moment? If, somehow, it had been possible to do so? Would she still have gone? Would he still have hated her (for she thought he had) for going? What would that kiss of temporary farewell have tasted of? Would it have had the power to persuade him to join her? Would she have _wanted_ him to do so?_

And so, she thought of that never-shared kiss, thought about it on that New York City pier, the lips of Fred Otto of the Lexington Ottos receiving the bussing with which she had been unable to grace Robin's.

She had never known if Freddy had felt the falseness of that embrace. At her act of perhaps, betrayal of Robin's memory, tears of surprisingly still unspent grief threatened to slip from her eyes and dampen her cheek.

Before that could happen, she felt Fred pull away.

"Someday, Sugar," he said, his voice not quite at its usual strength. Had he been another man he might have threatened the still by-standing Lucky George with harm if she were to be mistreated in any way on the coming journey. He did not.

He did not stay to watch the ship weigh anchor. He walked straight to the cab, threw a laid-back wave in her direction, and as the taxi expeditiously pulled away, she could no longer see his face from the shadow cast across his cheeks by his hat.

* * *

"When was the last time you saw England?" she asked Robin, the considerable length of Gershwin's _Rhapsody_ still playing.

He considered and seconds passed, in his way finding it hard to recall in this moment any other time. "February," he finally told her. "Around St. Valentine's Day."

It seemed so recent to her, as though he might have said, 'last week-end'. "And you arrived here - that is - you were stranded in April?" Knowing just how much of the record remained, and just how far things between them might go before she would have to switch it out, she let her head turn so that the ear of her uninjured side rested on his shoulder. "Where were you before that?"

"For two months we were in-country, in France, where we had been dropped." So casual, so routine, he said it. Dropping into an occupied country from out of the sky, only a bit of rope and silk to soften one's fall.

"So you have been away from home for almost nine months, now."

"No," he disagreed, jutting his chin with the thought. "It no longer feels much like home to me."

"How so? Is London so very changed since the war? Is it - are there - very great differences...in the landscape? The people?"

He brought his arm about her waist, letting his hand set on the upper curve of her hip. It felt as though he were settling in to tell her a story. "It is not London that has changed, though the war has certainly left its mark. It is only, as a dead man one finds London - the necessary need to avoid one's old haunts - one finds _oneself_, perhaps, so very changed. Hopping from the homefront to the battlefront to the underground front can be disorienting. It is better here." His hand gave her a little pat. "We are at war. We do not forget it. We do not go on brief holiday from it. Anymore than do the Islanders."

How strange his thoughts sounded to her, as though he were choosing to be here. As though he had settled on it, on the Islands, as his cause; this man who had no tie here, not even as a one-time visitor prior to his unit's stranding.

She had not meant to ask it. She did not know why she did. Perhaps it was that he was telling her things. That they were not arguing. Perhaps it was that even after all this time, all the separate life between them she really, still wished to know. "What were you thinking that day?"

His voice was nearly sleepy with the calm of the music and her resting against him. "What day?"

"The day I sailed for America."

"That day?" He said it almost with a little laugh, but not a fully rueful one. How far off that day seemed to him. Truly, a day from his previous life.

"I saw you, you know," she told him. "You _did_ come to the boat."

"You did?" he asked, giving her a squeeze. "Caught me out?"

"Mm-hmm."

He planted a kiss in her hair, for him the turbulent emotions of that day intangible to him in this moment. He spoke of them like an old man writing his memoirs; all recollection, no fire. "What was I thinking? Nothing good. I was thinking that I ought to storm the boat and demand you not go. That I ought to attempt to turn you over my knee like the spoilt child I thought you were showing yourself to be. That I ought to report you to Scotland Yard for having stolen a Cartier ring, whose promise you'd no intent to keep faith with."

At this she slightly pulled away from him so that she might see his face, and he hers.

"And, most upsettingly, that if I enacted any of those tactics that you would never wish to see me again. You must ask Mitch if you truly wish to know my black mood that fateful day. Doubtless he recalls it better than even do I. He took the brunt of it in your absence, after all."

"Mitch?" she asked, her eager eyes searching his face. "You have seen him? He was released and returned?"

Robin winced. "Your fiance, you may as well know, does not excel at keeping his promises."

Marion's jaw tensed at the news. She dug her hand into her pocket and again withdrew the growing dog-eared German telegrams, handing them over to Robin as if to further prove Geis' treachery.

Robin glanced at each briefly, not bothering to smooth them out to enable easier reading. "I could pretend to you it is the low level of light available, but we both know your German far exceeds my own. What do they say?"

She took them back from him. "They say that SS Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer not only has left behind a loving, faithful wife in Germany, but also...two small children." She gestured with the longer reply (written, unbeknownst to her, by Underlieutenant Diefortner), "and that their husband and father loves and wishes them well and cannot wait to again be with them."

Robin nodded his head. "And so he has attempted to dupe you."

Marion looked at him, herself now sitting fully independently of him. "That is all?" Her head cocked at the oddity of his nonchalant behavior in the wake of the news. "You are not ready to battle?"

Robin's face took on a bemused cast, eyebrow raised, at her seeming wish (uncharacteristic for her) for him to challenge Gisbonnhoffer. _Why_, he wondered, _would she not sit back again, where they had been so cozy, so peaceful?_ "Oh, it is a venal betrayal, to be sure," Robin agreed. "But you must understand, Marion. From my point of view it is no worse that you are taken from me, from your own precious freedom, by a bigamist than by a Nazi, than by a man involved in unjustly subjugating others - than by any man that would break your heart - and possibly you - in the process. A villain is a villain. I fear that you have been among evil men so long you have forgotten there is any other kind."

He could not, rather, he thought it not best to point out that the news of Gisbonnhoffer's lack of respect for vows of any kind was at the moment an unexpected ray of hope for him. Yet another obstacle between he and the woman he loved surmounted. The German lieutenant removed as any true rival. Perhaps, thought Robin, without so much as the slightest assistance on his own part, his life was coming back from where it had been stolen.

"Yes," Marion agreed with him on villains and evil men - not knowing the further turnings of his mind. "Well, I do know something of a scoundrel," she eyed him, taking his measure like she would have in the old days. "I seem to have fallen in among more than my fair share of those here of late." Without a pause she added, "Your man Allen kissed me."

"What?" And now Robin sat up straight, absent calm, farewell peacefulness. "Well, I cannot have that, now can I?"

Marion's breath exhaled in a scoff of disbelief. "And so you are more upset with his behavior than Geis'?"

Robin pressed his lips together hard and shook his head. "Your Geis will have this set upon his list of wrongs, do not mistake me. But how can I have my gang forcing themselves upon you - it was by force, yes? Non-consensually?"

She let her eyes slightly bug at the insanity of his query. "Well, yes, of _course_."

Robin sighed. "If Allen has done it, then I must have a talk with them all. This sort of behavior must not become SOP." Somewhere in mid-speaking he had gotten his bearings, a teasing coming into his tone where burgeoning outrage had threatened to bloom only moments earlier.

Hearing this, Marion sparked to the alteration, herself choosing to view the incident with Allen differently as well. She mused. "Perhaps they are only wishing to be like you."

"Like me?"

She acted as though weighing it in her mind. "You have, in your time..."

"Yeees. If memory serves."

"Memory?"

He did not wait for a better invitation. He grabbed her to him as determinedly, but as gently (minding her recent woundings) as he knew how. "Know this," he told her, "there is nothing in my life that serves, as far as I am concerned, as impediment to being with you, Marion Nighten. Not war, not prior troth, not separation of time, not difference of opinion. I am as unattached as last you left me. And as steadfast in what I want." And for the first time in months he kissed her.

He did not kiss her long (though she would have let him), nor as passionately as he might have wished (though in that moment she would have matched him), the trauma to her person, even to her very lips, still fresh in his mind.

As he pulled away, Marion returned little peck kisses, though the act did hold some small discomfort in it yet. She let herself imagine Robin's kiss (no matter how truncated, no matter how reserved) washing away the misguided salutes of Allen Dale, the myriad gestures of affection she had received over the years at the hands of Geis, imagined herself as a chalkboard, erased in one sweep, one caress of Robin's hand: herself dusty with the past, but unmarked. "I no longer consider myself to be engaged," she told him.

"And do you, then, need to locate new lodgings?" His mind, as always, to them being together.

Having some small insight into what he might be thinking, she pointed out, "I know Geis too well to think he will give up so easily. He claims he will pursue a divorce from his wife. And I must think of father."

His expression curdled at this, but surprisingly remained under control. "And you know of no way to break with Gisbonnhoffer, to sour him on you only enough to lose his interest, and not enough to spark his ire that you might be free of him? You _and_ your father?"

She shook her head. He had hit upon the very quandary she had been trying, in her mind, to reason her way out of. "It is only that he at present has let me have the deserved moral high ground. I could not end it with the true finality I wished," she looked away. "I could not risk father so."

"Finality," Robin asked, his soldier's mind piqued. "What, to kill him?"

She did not have to reply, 'no', her every muscle shouted it. "To sever all ties. That is all I want. My home." She looked away, soon the record would end. "My autonomy (such as even on the Islands it might be). To be left alone. To cease the masquerade where he is concerned."

She turned and looked back at Robin, surprised to see him smiling. "What is there happy - or funny - about this?"

"Well," he explained, "you cannot marry a man already wed. An observer _might_ choose to see that as not...such a bad thing."

"Yes," and here she let a harshness creep in. "But another observer might choose to note that perhaps, had I not dealt with him so swiftly, believed yet another of his lies, I might have held my tongue until I knew for certain Geis had released Mitch. As is, I cannot even credibly go to him and re-petition for Mitch, or ask after his whereabouts. I have hobbled myself from being a help to you, when I could have perhaps done much good."

"No," he put her hand in his. "That I will not accept. The man is utterly without honor - even to you. You cannot have trusted anything he professes as truth. We will have Mitch out another way," his tone and delivery here were utterly persuasive, as only he could make them. "Allen even now has contacts at work on it. And I have brought you a possible way to expedite helping us." He set to explaining Wills' potential windmill signal, gifting her with the spyglass, but he had not gotten far in his pitch before she had to change the record and announce the day's news.

Sitting back on the crate she had assigned him to, relishing the chance to watch Marion at work, he could not even feel cross at having to wait.

**...TBC...**


	18. Barnsdale Natatorium

**Barnsdale House - natatorium - 2:35 a.m. -** Allen Dale hated the water, really. Always had. Hadn't even learnt to swim until their Royal Army training required it. After all, hadn't an uncle of his died of drowning? Well, yes, not in water, of course. But still. Water and he, not on the best of terms, even here, among these islands where he was perpetually surrounded by it, forced to journey over and on it innumerable times. Several times each day.

Just, really, not his thing.

Robin had taken off for wherever secret location Marion broadcast the Nightwatch, leaving Allen with an order to stay put at the house. Nice house, interesting house - plenty of places to hide oneself, occupy oneself in the snooping about of.

He didnt really mind staying put, for all that his curiosity about the Nightwatch would have enjoyed sitting in on a broadcast. Well, whatever Lady Marion and Robin were about to get up to - scrapping or spooning - he probably would have _less_ liked to be sitting in on.

He had no good excuse to be about Barnsdale at all, but he reckoned with Marion's return he could garner some plausible invitation. Certainly the food (even the leftovers) here were top-shelf. And the guards occupying the chauffeur's quarters were free enough with their Reichmarks when it came to games of chance.

He had not been to the swimming pool before, though. He had found his way here tonight while wandering around to pass the time. He kept himself a good distance from it, closer to the lounge furniture than the tiled edge. The lighting was not engaged (he did not, actually, see how to turn it on), and only the moonlight through the high and broad windows cast any illumination across the water and the upon the decorative plants and statuary.

It had particularly struck upon a marble female nude, shadowing parts of her exquisite torso like as would clothing of some kind had she been sculpted wearing any.

Which she had not.

The figurine of her showed her as though stepping into the pool from its edge, one hand gone down to cup the water and lift it up to her extended foot. Which meant she was bent over at a...very admirable angle. Her face was turned, her chin tilted as though she had been caught in her bathe mid-act by someone approaching.

And though she was not nearly a life-size depiction, he found, quite surprisingly, that he could have sat and admired her visible 'charms' for some while.

He marveled that this place was simply full of beautiful women. Perhaps it _was_ something in the water, after all. _Marion, to be sure_. Good looking, but a right pill when she chose to be. Eva Heindl - a beauty he knew in more ways than most. Why, if the gang knew a third of the situations he had had to continue driving through, her in the back of the car with the Kommandant - why they'd none of them sleep at all of a night. Not without a good wank to blow off steam first.

Actually, he didn't know why, but he had always sort of protected Eva from the gang, left her out of the stories he tended to tell. He'd shared one-on-one with Robin specifics (not of a particularly salacious nature) about her relationship with Vaiser, thinking of it as 'need-to-know', but none of the rest of the gang had ever seen her, save over very long distances (if that), and did not even know her name. He wondered if they any one of them could have picked her out of a line-up of similarly figured girls. (Not that with a figure like hers there would be many like it to assemble.)

Maybe it was the times the Kommandant had directed him to drop her off at her family's house - barely a cottage, really - after a long party. The Kommandant having disembarked, leaving Allen alone to the task, Eva sometimes nearly dropping to sleep in the backseat as he drove the rutted lanes and rarely-used tracks back to her home.

Though he had never been invited in, he had seen the family at work, and at play there. Six in all. An infirm mother, an older teenage brother, too young to be the man the family was in need of. Two younger sisters and a small boy, about four. Allen found he understood Eva Heindl, though they two had never discussed it (nor likely ever would). She did what she did to survive. And so that _they_ might survive. Something told him her life with the Kommandant was not something she hid from them, either - nor wore as a badge of honor (as some Islander girls did where their Jerry lovers were concerned). She would treat it merely as a fact of life.

It was a kind of life to which in his past (his many pasts) he was far from a stranger.

The women he knew to have pursued it, though, had mostly lost what beauty they could have laid claim to years ago. Not so Eva.

_Beauty_, he thought, and got himself hit right between the eyes by the memory of Anya Grigorovna. There was something that had struck him from the moment he first met her. Someone looking as she did: neat, attractive, unerringly feminine - housed there among _that_ place. Like a carpet of violets sprung up about the cast-off pile outside a glue factory: unexpected. There was something both delicate and simultaneously tenacious about her. At least he thought there was. He found himself faltering in his thoughts of her. Knowing now, at Carter's word, what her life within Treeton was like he could no longer let himself believe that he knew her. Their ever-brief conversations so far from true intimacy among friends. She had given him no confidences to keep. He had tried his best to rein in his natural tendency toward flirtatious behavior with her, to prevent himself from seeming to offer things to a woman unable to return such advances lightly.

But he had slipped back into old, tried and true habits in the end, on behalf of Mitch. Not knowing what her agreeing to stay on _for him_ might cost her. That hurt.

To think that he had exploited her - asked someone already victimized to further submit to victimization - he would have bloody well punched himself had Carter not. He was an information man, after all. How could he not have seen? Not suspected?

His face, no need for him to cloak it alone in the dark, showed the disgust and angst that he felt about the situation. One of his fists had actually gone to grip a shock of his own hair and give it a tug of frustration.

He did not hear the padding of bare feet on the tile floor, but when the special nighttime lighting was engaged, his head snapped up in response to it, before he could wipe his anxious, self-loathing expression.

"Mr. Allen?" Eleri Vaiser asked, her own face a shock at seeing the dismay scored across his.

"Wot you doin' here?" he asked, half-barking out the question before she could think to ask him the same. In an eye's twinkling he had wiped his face clean of anything representing his inner thoughts. His demeanor, however, still gravitated toward brusque.

"I have, that is...Lady Marion told me...that I might swim." She indicated her present attire. She was indeed outfitted for a swim. The suit was obviously another loaner from Marion's closet, the hips and bust not filled quite as they ought to be on the nineteen-year-old's shape. Over her arm she had a towel draped, and a swim cap covering her hair. The cap and suit were of palest pink, the color barely discernable in the low mood lighting.

"And I'm sure you well may," he told her.

She moved to place the towel on a chaise. "Is it always so like this among the English?" she asked him. "So many people about so late at night?"

"Howzat?" he asked, for the first time feeling a bit of alarm at her inquisitiveness.

"Well, only that I wish to fit in. IF I am to be forced to stay here," she cast him a level glance, clearly thinking back to his refusal to smuggle her somehow to mainland France.

"Well, yes," he told her, "I dunno. Occupation's got us all a little out of sorts I reckon. Last couplea days hardly standard." His tone held none of its usual camaraderie.

"Have _you_ been swimming?" she asked, though his attire should have clued her in otherwise.

"No," he told her, himself surprised by what came next out of his lips. "I have been thinking about how I have disappointed someone. Someone that I care about. That I would rather wish not to disappoint."

She stood still, considering this. "And so you have disappointed yourself?"

"Yeah," he agreed. "That's it."

"Herr Geis has disappointed Lady Marion," she told him, looking at him intently to gauge his response to the news.

He held back a scoff. "And was that hard to do?"

Her brow creased. "I do not know. They have had an awful quarrel, so the newest parlor maid says the stable boy told her. Lady Marion told him she was glad to have lost his ring. And she does not seem to wish for another one to replace it."

Allen re-cast his coming-on grin at this juicy gossip as troubled concern. "Ellie," he told her, instructively. "I think that may be best for all concerned."

"Best?" she almost cried out in disagreement, almost stamped her foot at his (to her) incorrect judgment of the situation. "A man like Herr Geis having his heart broken? You did not see him this evening afterward or you would not say so. He is tortured!" She did not shout, but was no less impassioned. "He has been scorned. _I_ would not wish such unhappiness on anyone."

"Really," he replied, ambiguous in his delivery of the word. Still, he retained his seat, despite that knowing in her presence (as Kommandant's driver) he ought to stand.

"_You_ do not like him much, I see. But you are wrong," Eleri told him. "He has qualities, Mr. Allen. Can't you see that he loves her?"

Allen felt his inner frustrations begin to push their way to the surface, as they might for some men at the pub who've had too much and find their anger spilling over into a physical brawl. "Don't be daft, _Fraulein_," he half-spit at her. "He doesn't even know her! If he loves someone, he loves someone who doesn't exist." And of course he knew more than a little about that. The Nightwatch: a clever paste-up concoction of Lady Marion, not a girl he could ever truly meet. Anya: a spectre of what she had really been made to become, him ignorant of her hurtful truth.

At his harsh retort, Eleri's face looked as though he had slapped her, and he recalled to himself that life among the nuns and the other girls at Ripley Convent School most likely did not involve strange men taking apart your notion of true love at two in the morning. "Chin up," he tried to lessen his attack on her. "If she really has thrown him over, you may have a chance with him after all."

He wondered if the Nightwatch ever took requests. He knew exactly what he would set aside for Miss Vaiser. "_I fall in love too easily/I fall in love too fast/I fall in love too terribly hard/For love to ever last_."

"How shortly ago," he reminded her, "you were begging me to snatch you away to your Yanick. Your 'meant-to-be' freedom fighter...how soon after arriving were you forcibly snogging me? And here you are, pining over your father's right-hand man?" He scoffed at her, telling himself he did not care if there was hurt bubbling up in her eyes. "_You_. Have exhausted me," he said. "I'm turning in."

He stood to go, realizing in that moment of facing the high glass windows that did she stay to swim there was a distinct possibility this might prove just the way Marion stole home of an early morning after her broadcast concluded. _With Robin_. And he certainly could not have anyone sussing out that.

Allen looked at her, expecting Eleri to attempt to make a peace with him, possibly get him to stay. Instead she simply looked like a cross between petulant and wounded.

She stared at him, her eyes flaring as if to ask, "why are you still here, then?"

So it was to be soley up to him to find some reason to lengthen their time together. He noticed something tucked into the towel she had laid down.

"Wot's this," he asked, seizing it before she could stop him.

"Nothing," she nearly snapped at him. But it was obvious she wished to tell someone, and him one of the only people on the islands she knew. "It is an invitation." Begrudgingly she added, "just as you said would come. To Cabaret Alstroemeria, to see Joss Tyr's show...and dine with Herr Prinzer."

He looked up through his eyebrows from the fancy invitation card. "Then why do you not look happier about it?" he asked. "His is a rather elite guest list."

Her eyes cast down at this. "I do not know how to dance. That is, not in the popular style. And I am sure there will be dancing."

"Can you waltz?" he asked. "All good Germans can, I am told."

"Yes," she told him, and he took her into a hold.

"Now relax it," he told her, "and step in closer." As she did so, the unfitted top of her borrowed swimsuit gaped somewhat, without her knowing it, and looking down from his height he had a nearly unobstructed view of the tempting swells of Miss Vaiser's still coming-on 'charms'.

His immediate reaction was to raise his chin, and close up the hold as much as he could without seeming ridiculous. Certainly this was the last sort of distraction he needed. He made an effort not to roll his eyes at the foolhardiness of his own actions. What he did for King and Country...for Robin. They would never appreciate it. He tried to come up with the least romantic song he could think of, but he just kept seeing her silly swim cap, droopy rubber faux-flowers sprouting all over it.

"Okay, then," he announced. "Off with that - or I shall have to expend all my energy to keep from giggling at you."

He had assumed her hair was pinned up under the cap. He was wrong. With the cap's removal her dark hair cascaded over her shoulders, down her bared back and over his own arm where he had her in the hold. Before he let himself think too much about the dangerous turn that had given the moment, he launched into a song, showing her how to move to the steps by following his own. "_Pardon me, boy_," he sang lightly, "_Is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?/Track twenty-nine/Boy, you can gimme a shine_."

"You've stepped on my foot," she protested. Hers was, after all, bare.

"_No_," Allen disputed her, "you _misplaced_ your foot beneath mine. Give it another go, now..."

His mind was turning on so many axes now: Letting down Anya, safeguarding Marion's Nightwatch return, Wills' windmill proposal, another trip to come across the waters back to Sark, Geis given his walking papers, gaping swimsuit, length of hair tickling at his hand, fetching nude marble. He did not doubt he may have stepped wrongly. "_You...leave the Pennsylvania Station 'bout a quarter to four/Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore/Dinner in the diner/Nothing could be finer/Than to have your ham an' eggs in Carolina..._"

"What a queer song," she announced. "I don't understand half the words. What is it about?"

"Hmm..." Allen considered, "'S 'bout a chappy learnin' to accept his blunders, pull through them in the end," he lied. "Now just here, Hen," he fell back on being the instructor, "let us attempt a _bit_ of a dip..."

_Eyes up, Mate_, he coached himself to look away from that still prone-to-gaping top. _Lessens the distractions_.

Not that Allen Dale could say, all in all, he minded a healthy diversion every now and then. Did keep one from growing too gloomy sullen, after all.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**Author's Squee:** Did you see - at the Royal Wedding today? The first airplane flyover (while they were waving from the balcony) was made up of three period RAF planes from The Battle of Britain. Carter's Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane were there. The largest, in the middle of the formation, I think is a bomber (like he was flying the night he was shot down). I believe the tiniest one (it only holds a pilot) would be his usual Spitfire. *AWESOME*. **(/end squee)**


	19. Alderney  The Dangerous Inch

**Alderney - Treeton Camp -** He looked for the good bit. Searched for it like a man returning to his home following a decimating cyclone - desperate to find the one thing lost there he cannot live without. Frantically picking through rubble, pawing through debris - growing hysterical in his fruitless hunt.

He was long ago out of ideas, plans, solutions for how to handle the pain of _die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_. He wanted to break. He longed to give in. Could he do it? _Please, could he?_ Just...offer up a small thing? Something insignificant, but seemingly important? A thing that might buy him a brief peace? _Please?_

* * *

**En route to Treeton -** Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer had left his Guernsey estate at a strange hour the night before. It had not yet been quite two a.m. when he demanded one of his guards take him by car to St. Peter Port and a boat to Alderney apportioned to his use at the docks.

While on the pier, waiting for the boat to readied for launch, he had been unpleasantly surprised out of his black, singular frame of mind by the peculiar appearance of the island's Bailiff, Jodderick, who in short order explained that being out past the curfew was of the sole purpose to speak to _him_, that he had bribed a particular landser to let him know exactly when Herr Geis arrived to catch his boat back to his work on Alderney.

It was then Geis noted that with the exception of his overcoat, the Bailiff was head-to-toe in his pajamas.

"What is it?" Geis asked, even his curiosity unable to be piqued, despite the Bailiff's obvious distress.

"It is the reprisals, the Nightwatch killings." Jodderick spoke so quickly his words all but tumbled out one upon the other. He was clearly frightened at being out in the open past the strictly enforced curfew, even though he was clearly in Geis' company.

Geis' one eyebrow raised at mention of the Nightwatch, though his mind was still far more on the soon-departing boat than on Jodderick's troubles.

"My office is receiving threatening messages regarding them." He held out the paper doll chain, showed the writing that had accompanied it. '_Whichman watches you._'

Geis only half looked it over. "Not a very intelligent threat, Jodderick," he pointed out, dryly. "Your stalker is not even able to correctly spell 'Watchman'."

"No," the Bailiff shook his head, one hand fiddling with his coat's line of buttons closed against the night's chill. "There is an island story here, a sort of legend...of the Witchman."

_Bogeymen_. Geis gave a cockeyed smirk. "And what sort of story is it?"

The Bailiff's eyes grew round in the telling. "The sort you would not wish to have visited upon you - or your staff."

"So the threat then comes," Geis was bored, "not surprisingly, from an Islander. Were I you I should start with looking at the dead women's families."

"No!" said Jodderick, some of his old stentorian tones of command returning to him. "This is _not_ my fault. I had nothing to do with - no hand in these deaths. You must speak with the Kommandant and advocate for me - for my staff. They are scared half out of their wits to open packages of any kind. Scared that this man - Whichman - will strike again," he waved the paper doll chain, "and less innocuously the next time!"

"You wish _me_ to speak with the Kommandant?" The smirk appeared again.

"It was his doing. If he will only claim it as his decision, I feel certain these threats will stop." Here Jodderick's diplomacy (however misguided) kicked in. "Perhaps Herr Vaiser might even issue an apology for the misstep."

Geis let an air of danger descend on their conversation, and coat his tone. His eyes narrowed. Jodderick now had his full attention. The pitch of his voice fell appreciably. "You believe Herr Kommandant has mis-stepped?"

Jodderick's own demeanor backed down somewhat. "Well, he did not, after all, catch her."

Geis thought he had mis-heard. "Catch her?"

"The Nightwatch. I am _told_ she is at it again, as though nothing has changed."

Gisbonnhoffer's eyes shot like 9mm bullets to his wristwatch. He pulled back the wide cuff of his leather glove to consult it. Two-fifty-five. It was not enough time. Not enough time. There was no visible wireless about, the boat's radio pre-set to Reich-only frequencies. "She is back?" he demanded. A tingle of amazement began to grow at the base of his spine.

Jodderick nodded briskly in the affirmative. "There are some," he told the clearly rattled Lieutenant, "who say she has risen." His eyes searched Geis' for any sympathy to his current predicament. "So you see," Jodderick continued, bringing the discussion back on topic, "if you will only - " but he got no further, as a supremely distracted Gisbonnhoffer threw one long booted leg over the boat's prow and was onboard and directing the soldier at the wheel to dispatch them with all haste to Alderney, no further thought to Guernsey's Bailiff in his growing ever-more crowded mind.

* * *

Looking out the window of the military supply truck he had commandeered now, the dawn not yet upon the Alderney landscape, he knew himself to be caught between Marion and the Nightwatch. His mind circled over and around the two females like an impatient vulture waiting for its prey to die.

It was an endless track of thought. Marion: he refused to believe himself without hope. He would initiate divorce proceedings immediately. He would (with all dispatch) acquire the necessary legal documentation to show to her to prove that he had removed all impediment to their future union. And he would set about, in the meantime, to winning her back.

The Nightwatch: she had returned. It was still up to him to find her, to be there the moment she tripped up, the glory of unmasking her to be his alone. It felt like she had evaded death just for him. No ham-fisted strategy like the Kommandant's unconsidered killings would smoke _her_ out. She was a worthy adversary. Clever and shrewd to have evaded capture for so long. The trapping of her would need to involve an elegant lure.

He recalled the complaint of Jodderick the Bailiff (a man he had once thought of as a friend) only tangentially to his mind's main focus.

As the truck pulled through the barbed wire gates and to the camp headquarters and offices, Gisbonnhoffer's eyes strayed for a moment to the nearby blockhouse, which housed prisoners undergoing torture or being otherwise detained.

Strangely, he sighted a figure slinking away into the still-predominant shadows of the early morning. _Specialist Joseph_. Instantly he was curious to know what the man - expressly forbidden by him to be about that building - had been up to.

* * *

The door burst open. Mitch had been passed out. The rush of early morning air (he thought it must be of early morning, though no windows existed in this room to alert him of the passing of the days, the rising of the sun) roused him, and when his swollen eyes agreed to slit themselves open, he was surprised to see Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer in front of him, and not the recently departed Specialist Joseph.

"Let us have a chat," the tall officer invited, casually dragging a chair over to sit across from him.

It was the first time anyone had spoken to him in days. He had no ability to track how long he had been present here, how many sessions he had undergone at the hands of _die maschine_. Perhaps this was Gisbonnhoffer's appointed role in his torture: to be the man who, after the pain and anguish had been inflicted, asked the questions. The ones whose answers might cease further torment.

Still, he searched for the good bit. Was there a way he could be seen to both break and yet, do so helpfully for the unit? In _favor_ of his fellows?

_An inch of truth_, he thought. Wasn't Allen always on about that? The best cons, the best grifts all began with an inch of truth at point of sale? Very well. He had lived his life truthfully for the most part - well, for the entire part. But if on one day, at the right moment, he might ransom himself from further torture, and in doing so might also find a way to benefit the gang, he would follow Allen's advice. An inch of truth it would be.

Planning to respond to whatever was asked, he tried to send his tongue out of his mouth to wet his flaking, papery lips. To no avail, his tongue was swelling to the point that it would not quite leave his mouth. The last food he had seen was that long-ago breakfast at La Salle's friendly table. He willed himself not to think of that. Not to grow sentimental over the faces surrounding him there.

"I thought we might speak of Lady Marion," Gisbonnhoffer said, assessing the rather egregious damage done to the fisherman by Specialist Joseph, whom he would see punished for disobeying a direct order. "I am only just returned from having visited her."

He looked at the man across from him, in far worse shape than when he had last left him. He wondered at how _die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_ had so affected him, why it had not broken Flight Commander Thomas Carter down so. _That_ man never looking so broken, his body never so polluted by the tool's perverted function. Thomas Carter had never appeared so beaten by it. Rather he had persisted in looking tenderized as a six-rounds-in bare-knuckle boxer, sometimes down for the count - but always ready with that last minute grab for the ropes to raise himself. Always something more held back, reserved in a place neither Gisbonnhoffer nor even Joseph had ever found a way to touch.

The difference, Gisbonnhoffer believed, between a simple (perhaps very simple, as so many of these locals seemed to be) Island fisherman, and a trained, crack British soldier.

"She has asked after you, after your welfare," Geis told him. "It is very satisfying, actually, to know that I will have the honor of marrying such a compassionate woman. Don't you think?"

Mitch heard the lieutenant speaking to him, grasped that it was, again, something about Marion, without fully comprehending what it was the man said. He thought of Marion entering into vows with such a man, a man that could order the things that had been done to him - that could sit there, even now, and pretend to be _civilized_ in front of him. His piss and sweat and salt tears pooled on the floor beneath the chair to which he was chained.

_Marion wed to this less-than-a-beast. Robin having to live with it. Marion having to bed it_. There was nothing in Mitch's stomach to turn, to nauseate him, but he found himself so, nonetheless.

Kill two birds with one stone, his clouded mind suggested: a secret shared with Gisbonnhoffer, at which he might allow the pain to abate; a way to keep this man well and clear of Robin's Marion. Half a plan. It only lacked the inch of truth.

The intake of breath he took before speaking nearly did him in, his lungs sore to the point of the muscles within him burning at the rote task.

"You cannot marry Lady Marion!" he shouted, navigating his clumsy tongue in an effort to enunciate. "Her heart belongs to another! She is wed, some years ago now, to an Islander." The slits that were his eyes shut with the effort to get it all out. "She was no more than twenty ere it was done. And him now gone for a soldier. But wed, all the same! On my very life," he swore for effect.

Once it was done, the inch of truth sandwiched among it, the effort needed in the saying of it passed, his eyes did re-open into the swollen-over slits they had been, not enough of the irises visible for the other man to even name their true color.

What he was then able to witness caused his blood to run colder than anything that had yet been done to him in this hellish place.

The face of Geis Gisbonnhoffer became fluid. His features began to morph and twist into something that no longer tracked as quite human. His eyes took on a sharp, yet bore-ing quality. If his gaze could have melted all in its view, it would have. Like a cocked pistol, it became obvious he was sprung - in reaction to Mitch's 'confession' - ready for violent, explosive release.

Mitch did not know why, but his plan had failed. It had accomplished nothing of what he had hoped it might. And it had clearly awakened something doubly dangerous in this man that he would have done best to let sleep. Even in his murky, in-pain mind, he knew his error in an instant.

Geis spoke, his words sharp as diamond point - and as cutting. His tone chillingly fathomless. "Tell. Me. More."

"_Ad kalendas Graecas_," Mitch whispered like a memorized prayer, all strength in his vocal chords spent. "_Ad kalendas Graecas_," he repeated with conviction, his face wanting to contort into one of horror and despair, but the muscles and skin there too injured to comply.

"WH-AT?" the Lieutenant demanded, standing with such force that the steel chair he had been seated in thrust itself into the nearby wall, clattering heavily onto the floor.

The air in the room prickled and grew weighty, portentous as a coming storm.

A light scraping sound was heard as someone picked the capsized chair up and set it to right. "Come now, Herr Geis," came the Kommandant's voice, where he stood by the now uprighted chair. "'_Ad kalendas Graecas_' of course, 'at the Greek calends'." His voice was calm, light even, as though explaining rain to a child. "Calends: the first day of the Roman month from which days were counted backward toward the ides. The Greeks, of course, had no calends. So, you see," he was almost jolly in his delivery, "'Never'. Therefore _this_ man defies you - however intellectually." He tutted. "Rather curious, don't you think? A simple Islander? Spouting Latin...under torture?"

At this he moved toward Mitch, using his own hands to part Bonchurch's (known as Miller here) shirt. "Interesting scars, wouldn't you say?" he asked the Lieutenant. "Even to your untrained eye, Gisbonnhoffer?" His eyebrows flicked up. "Myself I have never been one of a medical bent, and yet...a curious cocktail to find, this _particular_ islander, wouldn't you say?" He turned and looked directly at Mitch, "_quantum mutates ab illo?_"

Gisbonnhoffer struggled to prevent himself from growling his query. "May I ask why you are here, Kommandant?"

"Specialist Joseph has been doing a bit of work for me. I knew you wouldn't mind...May I ask what _you_ are doing? Detaining _fishermen_? Diefortner tells me our Latin scholar, here, had something to do with the return of your one true love, Lady Marion?"

"Sir," Geis reluctantly agreed.

"You need worry about him no further, Herr Lieutenant. I am taking him off your hands. You may consider yourself dismissed from the project. Though, you may be thankful I am doing so _without_ having Diefortner draft a written reprimand for your permanent file."

Gisbonnhoffer protested. He could not afford to let this man go so easily...not after what he had just shared. "I need to speak with him further."

"No." Vaiser's word was final, though his voice the essence of calm in the lightly rendered denial. "The last thing this man needs is to speak to you. Go away now, he is mine. Go," he waved his hand dismissively, "see about the business of your job you have been neglecting, chasing after that Islander pet of yours. You are no longer wanted here."

Able to see no other action acceptable to his superior, no way 'round him, Geis left.

"Hello?" Vaiser asked. "Hello little fisherman? Are you still in there?" He tried to rouse Mitch.

Mitch grunted from where he had again swooned. Again, his eyes opened by slits.

"I will not overtax you, my _fine_ fellow," Vaiser began chipperly, "with details. Suffice it to say the Reich is trying out a new plan for select prisoners, certain they'll win hearts and minds with it." He began as though he might poke Mitch, and then settled for a mere air pat nearby his shoulder, "_You_ are to be billeted with a German family. Once you are...repaired...to your usual level of health, you will work for them, as their servant - hired man - whatever you would like to call it. Prisoner laborer. To ensure that you do not escape, nor try to run back home, you have been placed with a family deep into the mainland. So!" he clapped his hands together. "Let us hope your French is as good as your Latin, my boy." He gestured to two landsers standing at the ready just outside the door, who entered the cell and began to undo Mitch's bindings and fetters. It took both of them to manipulate his broken self out of the small room, and by the time they passed the doorframe, it was necessary for him to be carried to the waiting boat. By the time he arrived at the boat he was unconscious, and remained so throughout the journey over the water.

* * *

Geis stalked back toward the camp offices, his mind a-tilt. He could not even focus on the maddening interference of the Kommandant in the wake of the fisherman's wild (but passionately given) assertion that Marion, _his Marion_, had been - was still, possibly - married to an Islander.

He could not bring himself to believe it, to credit it at all. Setting aside Marion herself - hardly a woman suited to wedding a simple, provincial laborer - he could not imagine her noble family allowing such an ill-advised and in-equal match.

But then, perhaps they had not. Perhaps it had been a youthful indiscretion. Of course they would have wished to keep such quiet, even were they able to annul it or have it otherwise dissolved. But then, the fisherman had not said 'had been wed' or 'was once wed', but spoke of the matter entirely in present tense.

This Islander, so the fisherman declared, now gone for a soldier - so, officially his enemy. A man to be shot on sight. But, a man no longer present on these islands.

He thought of how he had so recently all but prostrated himself in front of Marion in the wake of her anger with him over news of his own long-forgotten family. He thought of the cast of her eyes, the hurt he perceived there, and, the disgust. Her treatment of him had been...belittling. Severe. If this were true - that she had a similar secret - could she have..._would_ she have..?

The idea proved all but inconceivable. It would make her...his eyes closed against the thought, so repellent, so beyond present belief.

But he could not banish it, could not make it go away, sharing a corner with Jodderick the Bailiff's request and the return of the Nightwatch. Instead it stood, the barest of facts. (No, _gossip_, he tried to tell himself.) The barest of testaments, of a broken, half-witless simpleton fisherman. But who, truly, had nothing visible to gain in that moment by lying about such a subject.

There _was_ something that he did not wish to acknowledge. Something about it he would rather turn away from: the fact that something of it had an undeniable ring of truth.

Marion had always told him she had returned to the islands in those dangerous days before the impending Occupation to tend to her father. But who truly would take such a risk? And taking it, stay on? At such a hazardous time? Simply, a dutiful daughter? Or a woman keen on a lovers' rendezvous? Perhaps a last chance to see a secret husband before he received orders to ship out?

Married at twenty (he almost gasped) would have made her three years a wife to this man when Jodderick had first introduced them.

He threw open the door to his office, not caring as the knob smashed into the reciprocal wall at the force of his opening it.

His eyes spied his file cabinet.

_Records_. Yes. Had this truly happened it would be certain that somewhere there must be a record of it. Somewhere on these islands.

The woman Grigorovna rushed into the room upon his arrival, almost colliding with him in her hurry to take his coat before he called for her.

He let her have the coat to hang, and walked toward his filing cabinet to lean one elbow upon it. Catching her eye he jerked his head to indicate that she was to shut the door.

As she knew he expected it, she did so, and walked toward him.

* * *

Anya Grigorovna did as she was bid and beckoned, as she might have any other day in the office block of the Treeton Camp. She had said she would stay. That she would attempt to find out what she could about Mr. Allen's fisherman. But nobody was talking. No one seemed to know anything about him; not why he was being held, nor for how long. Only that he had been brought here, and was, it seemed, _still_ here. A comfortless piece of circular information.

She thought of the Gypsy char girl, how she might have proven useful in the situation. How, even as little as they had had time and vocabulary for communicating to each other, she missed her. Another loss.

Losses that mounted in front of her like a child's wooden blocks stacked precariously in play.

Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer had positioned himself near the corner of the office, his legs somewhat apart, one arm on the filing cabinet. It was clear what he wished. What he required of her.

She walked like a sleeper toward him, stopping when her eyes were close, on level with his closely shaven Adam's apple.

"On your knees," he demanded, as though she needed prompting. His voice was poisonous. She imagined the spittle from such a mouth would be bilious, and freakishly black.

She looked at the corner edge of the filing cabinet. The same one she had broken in to, that had irrefutably given her the news of her family's total annihilation. How simple it would have been for him to tell her. He consulted files within it numerous times a day.

And yet he had not.

"Down. On your knees," he repeated the command like a curse. She saw his chin tremble with the force of whatever it was that had him in its grip.

"No," she told him, the sound of her refusal not at all harsh. Her head tucked down as her knee drove itself with the force of seven of her into his unprotected groin. "_Standing_ is better."

With the pain of the unexpected, damaging impact he began to double over, but she brought the back of her bent skull up into the point of his chin as it came down, clocking him soundly with a well-landed second blow.

His head snapped back and he fell to the unvarnished wooden floor.

Anya's triumph was short-lived. Knowing there was nowhere to run, she did not even attempt it.

"Guard!" Gisbonnhoffer screeched once he again found breath, purple already blooming along his jawline, both his fists set about his crotch, the knuckles of them clenched white with physical anguish.

"You could have told me," she said to him, her voice controlled, so unlike his in this moment.

"Told you _what_?" he gasped out, nearly retching.

The guard arrived, speedily comprehending the situation and training his weapon on her.

"That you murdered my family, _you motherless whoreson! You Devil's bastard_!" She did not know the words for the curse in German, so she rendered it in Russian.

As another guard arrived and they were taking her away to - she did not know where - she heard the Lieutenant shout after her, "your mother died of _illness_, you crazy..." but the exterior door to the office block swung closed behind them and she was unable to hear what filthy German moniker he chose to tag her with.

* * *

Not too long after, the Kommandant arrived.

Geis was now gingerly seated at his desk, still concentrating on babying certain injured parts of his anatomy. Without preamble, he started in on the situation of the Sarkese fisherman. "Why did you do that?"

"Send him away?" Vaiser asked, "Release him? No. I sent him to Eva. She is good for such things, I suspect." The Kommandant paused. "Well, rather, she is good for _many_ things. And good _at_ many others." His eyes bugged lecherously at this. "He believes I have banished him to France." He shared some of his insight (gained through Specialist Joseph's diligent notes) into the fisherman's psyche. "He is not the sort of man to run. Not if he believes doing so endangers those around him."

Geis held back a groan at the Kommandant's, as usual, high level of confidence in his own schemes. "And what purpose do you possibly hope to serve?"

"Purpose?" Vaiser smiled, tapping a finger on the inkwell atop Geis' desk. "Would you ask a magician to prematurely show his hand? Spoil his trick?" He shook his head. "All in good time, Herr Geis." He teased with his tongue at the corner of his mouth. "Like your divorce." Vaiser knowingly grinned, savoring it. "All in good time. What _has_ happened to your face?"

Geis cradled his chin for a moment in his cupped hand. Grimly he replied, "The woman you gave me - "

"What? Your secretary?" Vaiser laughed with glee. "Ho _ho_! I think I rather like this. Where is she now?" He looked about the room, peeked his head out the office doorway into the hall. "Not back among the camp proper already?"

"No. She has been taken to the blockhouse, on my order."

"Well, get her back!" the Kommandant happily demanded. "Get her back! This, I think could be fun. Have her sent 'round to my villa directly." His eyes sparked. A challenge. How he did like a new challenge.

And how he did enjoy - he could see Gisbonnhoffer was in pain, though the man had not said, though of course three separate guards, including the waiting-outside Diefortner had already related something of the just-occurred events to him before he had left the blockhouse. How he _did_ enjoy the thought of his lieutenant expecting something rather calming...and receiving something rather..._not_ instead.

'Teach him better than to lose focus mooning over Lady Moron.

_Tasty, tasty, tasty_, Vaiser chanted to himself as he turned to leave Geis alone with his bodily trauma and as-per-usual gloomy mood. A new toy to play with when he got home tonight. Better than Christmas, wot.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** '_quantum mutatus ab illo_' = Latin for 'how changed from what he once was'  
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	20. Sark READ

**SARK -** It was nearly dawn. Signaling the end of the scant hours, Flight Commander Thomas Carter had told her, that she would be allowed out-and-about at La Salle's farm. So she would come to appreciate the light - however little of it she might see when outside the farmhouse - appreciate it in these stolen hours before dawn, and after sunset.

She would possess the night, train herself to sleep during the long days. It could be done, she did not doubt. So many things she had learned since she had been taken by the Germans, chief among them that anything, truly, for good or for ill - with enough of one's will set behind it - anything could be done.

The colors of the sky were only just thinking of turning, the lay of this island's particular landscape granting one unobstructed views of both the sun's rise and set, no distant (or near) mountains to get in the way, no towering forests to block the line of the horizon.

She had no light of her own with her - another stipulation of her being allowed to roam freely in the night - and relied entirely on the moon. She did not mind.

She thought of the things that had so recently taken place since her gamble of an escape. Certainly she had never expected to fall in among so many - a veritable clan - of such men working to thwart the Germans.

The closeness of their attachment and loyalty to one another cheered her in a way that reminded her of what she thought of as home; that tightly woven society she had been absent from the fellowship of for so long. _Too long._

Her family would not even recognize her now, her hair shorn long ago, her body (despite enforced privation and sub-human nutrition) having altered in her time away from them from that of a child's to (when disrobed) an approximation of a woman's.

And her _Romanipen_ - the essence of what it was to truly be Roma? Since the _Porajmos_ began, the German _Einsatzgruppen_ appearing only to kill her people on sight, the others being sent to camps to be killed or forced into laboring for their enemies, she had felt such a terrifying disconnect from her culture. Unable to follow its laws and customs, unable to observe its celebrations, or oft-times even the simplest of _marimes_. Washing and eating (when there was a way to accomplish either) were no longer able to be handled as they ought.

_And the purity of her own, private physical self?_ Desecrated at the hands of both Germans, and fellow prisoners, on more than one occasion, wherein she had proved powerless to oppose her attackers. She would never be wanted by any Romany in marriage.

Her entire way of life had been torn from her people, raped of their culture, the ways in which they believed it best to exist. Raped and pillaged and thrown on a pyre. She did not know if it was something that could ever be repaired, reassembled. And if it were, she was not certain there would be a place for her among it.

Still, her mind called to her, in echo of the belief that had, for so long, kept her going..._anything could be done_.

Somewhere, someone of her intertwined family could be found, someday (and she must stay alive for it). Someday she could re-join Romany society, in a lesser role than wife and mother, but still reunited with her people, her clan - what had been before the war - the _Porajmos_ - her world.

* * *

In the bare light of the pre-dawn, she saw the bird, not knowing enough to name it for what it was, a peregrine falcon at hunting its prey. And her quick eyes sighted that frightened prey, a dove. The falcon struck, and had the smaller bird, but for reasons Djak could not discern, could not keep hold of it.

Injured, the dove plummeted toward earth, the falcon somewhat dazedly flying off, perhaps not interested in a meal proving such a trouble to acquire.

She tracked where the dove would fall and raced toward the spot, the bird unable to fly with both wings.

When she arrived to the spot, not far from the manure pile, the dove was pacing back and forth on its spindly bird's feet, one wing worse for wear, and wearing a dazed look of its own.

She bent at the knees into a low squat and listened as the wounded dove cooed to itself. Making similar soft noises of comfort, she gently reached to scoop the bird up in one hand, settling its wrongly bent wing into something approximating a tuck.

In doing so she sighted something attached to its leg. She withdrew a paper from the tiny metal ring there and placed the bird inside the shirt she wore, its excess fabric making a sort of comfortable sling-like nest for the animal, which did not protest at being approached or handled so.

* * *

He woke to the sound of Djak the Gypsy.

"Wills, read!" she demanded, using one of the remembered words in her new English lexicon. She tugged like an annoying younger sibling on his arm. "Wills! Read!"

Wills' eyes opened, but not without great effort. He had only been asleep for scant hours following his appointed watch the night before (longer watches being needed as they were down three men - Mitch captured, Robin and Allen off to Guernsey). In initial reaction to realizing that whatever she wanted was not a true matter of life and death - or Jerries - he tried to roll away from her, only to far-too-closely encounter the thrown-open armpit of the still sleeping Flight Commander Thomas Carter, his bedmate for the night.

With a grunt of low-grade misery, Wills sat up, his feet to the floor, scrubbing at his eyes, and looked at her.

"Wills!" she again demanded.

He noted that she seemed to have gotten his name down.

"Read!" Her voice carried the authority of a particularly strict physical education instructor he seemed to recall from his early school years. She thrust a miniscule paper under his nose. Far too close under his nose. She nearly served him a paper cut.

He took the paper and squinted at what was written there. It was a series of letters and numbers, in no discernable order.

He used the version of '_I don't know_' she had given him in Romany.

"Read!" she beseeched him again.

"No, see," he tried to explain in English this time. "I don't know what it says. I can read it out to you..._A-4-G-F-67-9-4_...but it doesn't hold any _meaning_..."

With apparent disgust she snatched it back from him and deliberately rounded the bed to Carter's side. "Flight Commander Thomas Carter!" she announced this time, surprising Wills by addressing the other man in English. "Read!"

Carter, though he had been asleep far less time than had Wills, responded rapidly to her rousting of him. He was sitting up in the bed almost immediately, his eyes clear and focused, accepting the paper from her and studying it for a moment.

"Gibberish," he said aloud. "A code, perhaps," he added to her in Russian. "Letters and numerals only." He looked to her for an answer. "Where did you find it?"

Wills wanted to tell them to quit with the Russian-thing. If Djak were able to fall back on that mode of communication in a pinch she would never get a best grasp of English and (perhaps more worrying to him) _he_ would never get a good handle on her Romany.

"Says he found it on a bird," Carter offered, having already handed the slip of paper back to Djak.

"What sort of a bird?" Stephen could be heard to ask from the hallway, where the girl's insistent demands and impatient actions had woken him from his own sleep.

Wills exchanged a glance with Carter, and asked Djak in Romany, "bird?" at which prompting Djak removed the dove from where she had nestled it.

Its wing's injury was not lost on the men.

"It is a dove," Carter offered, informing the sightless La Salle of Djak's reveal. It has an injured wing."

"A dove?" Stephen asked, uncertainty in his tone. "Doves are forbidden."

"Forbidden?" Wills asked. "What _can_ you mean?"

"It is only ever the Seigneur," Stephen explained, "that can keep doves on our island entire. Else wise they might overrun us here, there are so few of their natural predators among the islands. _That_ is original Sarkese law. However," the former rector's brow grew troubled, "since the Germans came they have forbid any among the islands from the keeping of doves or pigeons - birds of any kind, fearful they could be used to carry messages."

Wills nodded. "As this one clearly has been tasked to do."

"Clearly," Carter agreed, returning himself to the mattress Wills had just vacated, "but in a code _we_ are unlikely to be able to crack."

"We cannot set it free to travel on to its rendezvous - " Wills referenced the bird's obvious inability to fly at present, "but we _must_ wish it to arrive. It is obviously not a _German_ courier."

Carter, head to the pillow, eyes moments from re-closing, warned, "Even if it is not doing the Reich's work we ought not aid it on its way without knowing where it is bound - and with what information."

"Even so, 'tis no reason to punish the messenger," Stephen asserted. "Perhaps have young Djak take the bird to John, see what he might be able to do to ease its suffering."

* * *

Wills herded the still-dissatisfied Djak down the constricted stairwell to where John had been taking his turn at the watch.

The unit's medic looked over the bird.

Djak re-produced the sliver of paper, demanding of him, "John, read!" and he also gave it a go, coming up with nothing.

He did the best he could to patch the wounded animal, having no experience with avian medicine, nor the veterinary field whatsoever. As Djak moved to re-cradle the bird inside her shirt, John managed to catch a glimpse of suspiciously roughened skin on her torso.

"What's that?" he asked, his eyes flicking to Wills' as he knew the Gypsy boy would not answer.

"What?" Wills asked, a nervousness beginning to tumble about his stomach. _What had Johnson seen?_ Surely, to his own eye, Djak's disappearing the dove into the recess of her shirt (previously _his_ shirt) had revealed little, if even darkness, so well-executed the move had been.

"He's a rash on his skin from the looks of it." The large man extended a large finger toward the now-covered general area. "Ringworm. Impetigo, even." The older man's eyebrows arched at Wills. "Did ye not see it when you gave him the lice-down?"

"Me?" Wills asked, trying to suppress his anxiety. He threw up his hands. "I saw nothing!"

"Well, it is best I shall have a look-see at it, before we are one and all crawling with it." John took a step toward Djak.

Wills watched, not certain whether - or how - to intervene.

But unlike the unfortunate Wills earlier in the washhouse, Johnson was more familiar with holding disinclined patients at bay in such a way that he might examine them. His own considerable strength was set against the girl, his proximity to her already close, and he counted on her desire not to fall into a tussle and harm the bird to be in his favor.

In short order and with little struggle or fuss - save angry gruntings from Djak - Johnson had the shirt tail flipped out of her trousers, and the waist of that garment away from her side to examine the rash. Never one to be eager to steal a peak down another fellow's trews (even in the name of medicine), he did find his eyes drawn, after inspecting the rash, to the top inside of the boy's leg, surprised to note that even in the lad's slender-from-early-stage-starvation state the beginning of the groin muscle that should have been quite visible at the spot where the rash had settled itself was missing. Quickly, before the lad could protest too much, John switched sides and looked for it there. Not finding it, he went ahead and (in the name of medicine) quickly sighted the lad down the front, where, even in the concealing shadows of the Gypsy's trousers _something_ ought to have been hung.

With alacrity, Johnson let the waist of the trousers go.

Huffily, Djak took three steps backward, her face displaying her annoyance with both her present treatment, and lack of finding anyone who could explain the bird's message to her.

Johnson looked at Wills.

Wills looked back, "So?" he asked, aiming for a tone of normalcy.

"Impetigo," the medic declared, his voice like gravel. His gaze was steady. "It shall have to be dealt with, or we'll all be covered in it shortly."

Wills visibly let out his breath. "Right. Good," he agreed. He wondered if it were too soon to chivvy himself and Djak out of the room.

"I will work on mixing up a treatment," John said. "And about the other?" he continued on to ask, his eyebrow cocked at Reddy.

"Other?"

"What shall we do about _that_?" It did not even occur to the Scotsman that there was any way Reddy might not know the Gypsy's true gender.

Wills raised his shoulders and hands in a gesture of 'don't know'.

"Ticking time-bomb, that is," Johnson groused. "Don't have to call Royston in to tell you that." He cast a growlish expression at Djak, which at the sight of her cradling the dove, her slight frame showing the German depravity she had been living under, morphed quickly enough into one of half-tender (if slightly exasperated) compassion.

Seeing this, and ignorant of the exact nature of the two men's discussion, she smiled at him.

"Rash," John again turned gruff, pointing with great thrust to the spot in question. "If we don't fix it, it could take you over, and you'll die."

"John," Djak answered him in reply, and again, out came the paper. And again she keenly demanded, "Read!"

* * *

**ALDERNEY -** "Not usually one to ask such questions, Sir," Allen spoke to the Kommandant, seated behind him in the back of the moving car. "Only, Lady Marion and Fraulein Eleri _were_ wondering..."

"What's that, Driver? You are trying to share some sort of news of my brat child?" Vaiser leaned incrementally forward.

"Only that she was asking after the Sarkese fisherman wot helped rescue Lady Marion. Miss Eleri seems quite taken with the romance of the whole story."

"Yesss," the Kommandant agreed dryly. "Romance. The reason she was sent here, of course. '_Romance_'. Well," he replied chipperly, "you may tell them he has been sent home to his boat and his family, properly rewarded by Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer for his part in the returning of Barnsdale's once and future mistress." Vaiser grinned toothily. "I say, Driver, what did you think of Herr Geis' secretary?"

Allen had to work to keep his expression non-committal. "Did, Sir?"

"Yes, 'did'. As in, _did_ you like her, _did_ you find her attractive, _did_ you ever..." his voice trailed off as his tongue curled around his front teeth.

"Not as in 'do', Sir?"

"Well, you see, Mr. Allen, I had taken her off Herr Geis' hands on a lark. I thought I might like her more for myself. But, I am sorry to say, that with only the shortest of trial periods I find I do, in point of fact, not care much for her, nor her brand of rebellion."

"Rebellion, Sir?"

"Yes," he did not elaborate. "I've arranged to have her transferred to Jersey under _Oberseer_ Jarl Derheim."

Allen worked hard to sound conversational. "Operation Todt needs another in their secretarial pool, then?"

"Goodness me, no!" Vaiser chuckled. "They are simply in constant need of mindless, unskilled labor. Bodies to throw at placing their mines. It is a pity, though."

Allen had to swallow back, 'nice to hear you say it', as he knew the Kommandant too well to think those words' sentiment was genuine in a humane way.

"I should very much have liked to see you two become friends." Vaiser's mind reverted to its old proclivities, and he took a moment to envision the now-banished secretary in the front seat with his Driver, nearly on her stomach, face-down, her head all but colliding with the steering wheel. His driver, tightly sprung from the waist down, attempting to still successfully pilot the auto. He restrained himself, just barely, from chortling.

In lieu of answering Vaiser (grateful to be excused from such) as they had arrived, Allen pulled up the car, turned off the engine and got out to open the Kommandant's door.

As Vaiser was getting out, he withdrew a small sheaf of Reichmarks from his black SS overcoat, stuffing them without looking inside the front placket of Allen's chauffeur's uniform. With his other hand he gave them a firm, thumping pat.

"Do not think I am unaware," he cautioned Allen, looking over beyond the driver's shoulder, "or unsympathetic to the fact that such information about the Sarkese fisherman, or any other prisoner - if shared with the proper people - might yield you considerable revenues, further increase your standing in the present culture of Occupation. _Do_ know that I value you in your position here. And, by all means, Mr. Allen, find yourself a woman. Take her to that particular shop in St. Peter Port..."

"Wot? Ginny...Glasson's?" Allen asked, curiously.

"Yes. The very one. Yes. Have her polished and primped - money no object. And see that the service is placed on my tab. By all means. I owe you that much."

Not aware of the Kommandant's bent-of-mind about himself and Anya Grigorovna, and awash in an inner dialogue of both hope for Mitch and growing despair for the transferred (lost-to-him) Annie, Allen found there was nothing to do but thank the architect of his divided mind, close the car door behind him, and begin the long, solitary wait until he was called upon to drive Herr Vaiser somewhere else.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** _Porajmos_ - Romany for the systematic genocide of the Roma people, on par (I think) with the word Holocaust or Shoah; _Einsatzgruppen_ - mobile German killing units on the Eastern Front, tasked with carrying out the _Porajmos_; _marime_ - Hindu purity laws still respected and followed by Roma peoples. 


	21. London Pride

**GUERNSEY -** He was being taken home. Across the waters.

Without opening his eyes, Mitch believed he could feel the military-ness of the boat he had been put on, the uniforms of fellow soldiers sent to guard and protect him, to ferry him back across the Channel to England. _This is how it was meant to be_. How it should have been all those months ago when they fled France, had the unit's stolen craft not taken on water from the enemy's hulling of it. Had they not had to, of necessity, agree to a stranding on the Channel Islands. Not even a half-way point in getting home. And in the grip, the very belly, of the beast.

He felt happy. Relieved. He sang to himself. Rather, he let snatches of songs swirl and chatter on in his head, like a telephone operator eavesdropping on multiple calls simultaneously.

Deanna Durbin chirped, "_I can see the lights of home/Shining brightly oer the foam,/I can see somebody there,/Loving eyes and silver hair,/I can see her kneel in prayer/I long to be/Beneath the lights of home_".

Ah, now, that was cheery.

"_There'll always be an England,/While there's a country lane,/Wherever there's a cottage small/Beside a field of grain.../And England shall be free/If England means as much to you/As England means to me_".

His heart pumped to the pomp of the rallying tune.

And then would come his favorite. The tinny sounds of Noel Coward singing his own-penned lyrics. "_London Pride has been handed down to us./London Pride is a flower that's free./London Pride means our own dear town to us,/And our pride it forever will be./Every Blitz your resistance toughening,/From the Ritz to the Anchor and Crown,/Nothing ever could override/The pride of London Town_".

He worried for nothing. He thought, distinctly, of nothing. Of no one. In short order he again swooned, succumbing to his injuries, his exhaustion.

* * *

The songs would play on for him, time and again. His swollen eyes would not tell him where he was, not permit his vision the necessary acuity to discern his surroundings. He did not know if this went on for days, or only hours.

But he did not worry. Doubtless he was in a lovely English seaside hospital by now, nurses and ward matrons in crisp pinafores, brooking none who opposed their regimented, efficient care of their patients. Of him. At times he wondered if Allen, in his post-crash blindness, were not there, too, in the familiar bed beside him.

But his throat would not speak to ask for Allen, would not work much at all, beyond the occasional gurgle, or strangled version of a cough.

Someone with cool hands, smooth hands, would give him water, or sometimes something thicker and warmer in those moments. They would hum something terribly comforting, the words and even the tune of which he could never quite puzzle out before drifting again, into the fog of his bruised mind.

* * *

Mitch woke, coughing.

"What would you have your mother to do, then, Love? Douse the fire she just built with her wet underwrappings? I canna be responsible if your departed father, rest his soul, built us a poky excuse for a chimney that not even a fine new stove pipe can mend. It _was_ one of the few honest moments of work he ever did afford his family, after all."

The woman's voice was loud. Not hushed as he was accustomed to in hospital.

"'Tisn't _my_ fault your Kommandant's _haomme_ has such weakness of the lungs! 'Tis a sign of weak character, you know. I shall bring up some of my full-moon liniment from the _cellier_ if you like. We can wrap his chest in gorse once he's marinated half the hour in the embrocation, see if that won't hearty him up."

"_Mere_!" a younger woman's voice attempted to gently call the older lady down. "We are meant to see him well, not worry him into Eternity. Then he may work for us. Perhaps he might have some skill at opening poky chimneys."

"Well, he is a right peaky-looking runt just now. My own heart should stop, my sweet Eva, if he were to attempt to so much as climb a ladder. I should have to spell it first to ward off his falling."

Mitch tried his eyelids, flexed them until he felt confident they would fully part. They did.

He was in a small cottage, possibly more a hovel. It was quite smoky, despite being indoors and despite two of its three visible windows being thrown open for ventilation. He could hear the sounds of a child and an older girl out-of-doors. The older woman across the room whom he had heard speak first was barely a swirl in the hazy air.

But nearby his bedside-yes, he did appear to be lying on a bed-was someone else.

She had a gentle face, with eyes that registered not a bit of surprise at seeing his open. Only took on a sort of welcoming quality, as though his lucidly waking was on par with a patiently hoped-for introduction.

Something pulled at his scattered mind. "Do I know you?" he asked her, unable to figure out why he would think so.

She shook her head. "We haven't met," she assured him. "You are here, with us. With my family. We are VolksDeutsch. The Kommandant has tasked you here, first to heal, and then to labor on our small patch as a hired hand." She passed _her_ hand (how familiar it felt!) across his temple. "But do not think of work, now, _Cheri_. If you must think at all, think only of mending." She leaned in closer, conspiratorially. Her hair smelled of hothouse flowers. "And pay no mind to the madwoman Hilda, known as my mother. She is all buzz, and very little sting. And if your health does not restore ten-fold she will loose her reputation and meager income among the country folk who buy her cures. So you see, she has a vested business interest in your both resting _and_ healing." She smiled.

He smiled. His eyes began to close. He wished to ask her where in France they were, exactly. He wished to ask her name. _He wished_...he slept.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** In Guernsey French "_Guernesiais_": _haomme_ = man; _cellier_ (actually, just straight-up French) = cellar; _Mere_ = mother; _cheri_ = beloved, darling (obviously used more lightly here).  
In German, _VolksDeutsch_ refers to ethnic Germans, not simply German nationals (as persons of various ethnicities might be). 


	22. A Matter of Record

**SARK -** "They are looking well, La Salle," Dr. Battley gave his final assessment on Stephen's healed eardrums. "It is a credit to you that in your earthy work here you never contracted any infection."

"And a credit to Cousin Alex's help." La Salle never passed up a chance to promote Thomas Carter, his (to the glad-to-look-the-other-way eyes of the Islanders) new hired man, Alex La Salle, come to help from Jersey in the wake of Dick Giddons' death those weeks ago.

"Yes," the doctor agreed, having, on his way here, passed that very man at work out among the fields of La Salle's tenement. "Mmm. The less said there, doubtless, the better." Battley began to stow his instruments in his black satchel. "These types of injuries may take as long as three months in the healing, and here it is a little less than two and you've recovered. Would that all my patients were blessed with such robust recoveries."

"I _have_ heard that those on the larger islands suffer," La Salle offered, "from an inability to heal, brought on by poor nutrition and lack of proper medical necessities readily on hand."

"Yes," Battley agreed, the set of his mouth grim at the knowledge of that truth. "It was, you know," he went on, letting the grimness fade out of his expression, "_ReichKaptain_ Lamburg himself who authorized the medicines for you. No doubt they came straight from a German dispensary." The doctor sized up his patient's reaction to this. "Does that not make you uncomfortable? To take from the occupiers?" As an aside he mumbled, "not that they did not owe it to you, having brought on your injury in the first place."

"Perhaps, then, I may give you this," Stephen stood and reached into a kitchen shelf, pulling out what of the medication he had not had to use, "and you might find further ways for other Sarkese to benefit," he cracked a smile, "from, as you say, the Germans' ongoing munificence."

Battley took the glass bottle and tube of cream from La Salle's hands and grasped them in his own, like the treasured gems of his profession they were. His eyes began to swim in tears. He had been (of necessity) attempting to practice his healing profession without such needed supplies for so long. "God bless you, La Salle," he said, with sincerity, before recovering himself and his usual skeptic's point of view.

Stephen smiled on, not having to see Battley to know that the man had been touched by the gift, the former rector's hand reaching out, catching air, until it collided with Battley's upper arm, and he was able to give it several strong slaps.

"Before I go," the doctor set into warning him, "your 'friend', the German lieutenant from Alderney? The author of your ailment?"

"Gisbonnhoffer?" La Salle volunteered the name he was not likely to forget anytime soon.

"Yes. No one knows why - not even Lamburg, I'm told, but he is at uncovering marriage records on all the islands. He arrived here several days ago planning to ransack what he expected to be Sark's own civic archive. Much as he has done, rumors say, to the abandoned one on Alderney."

Stephen attempted to understand. "And it is your conclusion that he is trying to locate marriages between Jews and Gentiles? And any children of such? You think he might somehow plan to use Louise's ancestry against me?"

"No," Battley replied reasonably. "I do not have any idea what the man might be about. Only, Lamburg asked around and then had to inform him that all such records on Sark are held within individual parish ledgers. That there is no general depository for such. With a considerable show of anger, the Lieutenant returned to Alderney. But I do not expect his curiosity is satiated."

"So you anticipate him coming for my register?"

"I do not know what to expect from a German's twisted mind, La Salle, but any fool would know you ought be on your guard, when the dog you once deviled is looking for bones - and you have such a choice example sitting on a shelf in your best parlor."

The kitchen door scraped open, revealing that it had begun to lightly rain outdoors. Thomas Carter passed through the door and into the kitchen. Though it was raining he was not even much in the way of wet.

The Doctor's eyes clearly showed how unusual he found this man's arrival. In the Islands' climate, if one simply gave up farming when the slightest of showers broke out, one would certainly accomplish little - in work, in travel, in anything.

"Alex!" La Salle welcomed his 'cousin' back into the house.

"Doctor," Carter acknowledged the other man, anxious to be out of the visitor's presence.

But the doctor excused himself quite quickly enough, without showing any personal dread of, or distaste for, the light rain.

When he was gone, Carter attempted to apologize for interrupting the two men. "I am sorry, Stephen. It is as we feared. The hair dye simply will not bond with my hair. When a rain comes up it begins to wash away, staining my shirt, and unmasking me for the man I am."

"Well," said Stephen, trying to comfort the pilot-in-hiding, "even if it runs out entirely, your 'tache," he referenced the (also dyed) florid Imperial-style mustache that had been cultivated across Carter's face in the interest of concealment, beginning on his upper lip, the whiskers growing broader and thicker as they joined with his robust sideburns, "your 'tache will serve us in a pinch."

Unconvinced, Carter accepted the cloth La Salle offered, blotting at the now running-from-his-temples-and-neck dye - burdening the former rector no further by mentioning that the rains also affected his eyebrows and already-referenced mustache much the same.

* * *

**GUERNSEY -** Elerinne Vaiser had rarely felt so happy. Certainly with the nuns at Ripley Convent School she had generally felt safe, and even, perhaps somewhat (in a sort of inspecific way) loved. But for the most part she had felt bored, like she was waiting for life. Waiting to be called out into the actual living of it.

She was a Vaiser (though she did not care to think of that fact) - she could paint her will on a canvas of any size, but the larger, preferably, the better.

She had not wanted to stay here, on these poxy little islands. She had wanted to see Berlin, or Paris. Salzburg, even, would have been an improvement. And she had wanted to join Yanick. How silly that name sounded to her now. _What had she been thinking?_ She did not doubt he was a fine man, a man with admirable ideals. But one did not set off to throw in one's lot with such a huge unknown. For all that she had learned of him in their brief encounter, he could have been married already. She had been a child. A foolish, unworldly child. She had not known what love _was_. What it could be.

But then, she had not known - not really known - a man like Joss Tyr.

She could not attend his shows enough, could not often enough stop by Ginny Glasson's shop, where he seemed to be found most frequently when he was not onstage.

She was enamored of him in every possible way. Nights she dreamed of what he might look like without his face paint, without his prosthetic wooden fingers. Sometimes the dreams were horrific, sometimes achingly beautiful. Always, never enough. There had to be more.

Never enough invitations to Cabaret Alstroemeria. And once there, always far too many irritating soldiers asking her to dance (with Mr. Allen's tutoring she had quickly become more than proficient), asking if they might bring her a drink, never leaving her alone when the top billed act (the new sun in her Galilean solar system) took the stage.

But even so, even in loving (_like a grown-up_, she told herself, _loving_) Joss Tyr, longing to be only his, she could not fully banish from her mind, from her hungry heart, the romantic darkness of Herr Geis, so infrequently at Barnsdale anymore, and when present so rarely in a humor fit to be interacted with.

If she had not so respected and revered Lady Marion, she would have tried to love him, tried to heal the tear in his heart with love from hers. But he was meant for Marion, Eleri was convinced. And Marion for him. She would no more have interposed herself between Tristan and Isolde.

* * *

**SARK -** La Salle had come with them that day, hiking to abandoned Le Moulin, where Wills' work was nearly finished. Djak had watched with great curiosity as Reddy stripped off and re-fitted the gears that turned the millstone to run counter to themselves, and that would allow Johnson, with no small amount of effort, to defy the prevailing wind of any day, and turn the sail-less vanes opposite it.

The signal's implementation would allow the unit to communicate with Marion that they needed to make contact with her face to face, its use faster (and less dangerous) than a trip to Guernsey in person. Marion, of course, had had the Nightwatch at _her_ command, able any night to pass coded messages to (or for) them.

It had been decided that, save in gravest emergency, Le Moulin's new signal would be available for use during certain hours only (so that Marion might know when to look for it); two stuffed crows to be situated on a bare vane to signal greatest trouble: a sign that Lady Marion (Djak had learned better than to think of her, or refer to her, as the _rom baro_'s wife) should seek the safety of immediate shelter by going into hiding at a pre-ordained location until one of the unit could come to her.

Crows were a natural choice, after all. Their sleek black feathers stood out nicely against the weathered wood of the old mill. And plopping the decoys into place often encouraged a larger grouping of the actual birds to stop for a sit as well. Crows being so abundant on the island that they gave their name to the Sarkese people, who wore '_les corbins_' as their moniker among the other Islanders.

The dove that had come to Djak that day, though healed and well enough to fly, would not leave. Thomas Carter had announced he believed it had imprinted on her, it now thinking Djak to be its mother, or life mate. The pilot took tremendous (for him) humor from this, as he still believed Djak to be a teenaged boy. So now, a young boy with a bird for a child, or a bird for a lover. Royston shared similarly in enjoyment of this paradox.

* * *

Wills worked hard, putting in place the final touches of his re-engineering feat. He saw Djak again at play with the still-unnamed dove. He was having a harder and harder time with his Romany, now. Though his skills in it increased (as had Djak's in English), he found himself still tripping over the use of simple pronouns due to Djak's hidden gender.

Certainly this would not have proven a problem between the two of them. Both knew what she looked like without her skivvies. But Carter was proving a quick study-by-proxy, and was picking up more and more Romany. Wills feared the day was not so far off a grammatical slip (if a slip of no other kind) would prove the Gypsy girl's unmasking.

In the dusty light of the windmill's interior he spied her above him, walking a high crossbeam like a circus acrobat, following her friend and constant companion, the dove, who settled higher and higher in the wooden windmill as though egging her human friend on, seeing if the nimble girl would match his avian daredeviltry.

Wills could hear the dove coo, and the girl singing - somewhere between a hum and a melodic groan one of the songs she had explained to him of her people. It was about separated true loves, spurned bridegrooms, and a Romany woman as beautiful as the night sky's curtain of stars.

Of any evening, as those of them tasked at La Salle's hunkered down there (Allen at the Dixcart, John and Royston oft times still trying their hands at retrofitting the mines to be of future use), Djak would sing, or spin tales for the four of them present, Wills doing his best to translate (and do justice to) the old Romany poetry that made up her people's songs, their ancient story tales.

Days, when she must not to be out-of-doors, John, himself handicapped from much travel afield due to his own eye-catching looks, had set her to learning to read English via Louise La Salle's found journals.

John would sit next to the Gypsy (whom he knew to be a girl), dwarfing Djak with his size, towering above the page she studied to read aloud; Stephen sometimes at work in the house, listening in, sometimes seating himself to better take in his wife's trivial notations on the industry of their farm, the occasional sidenote added only scattershot-ly of their lives.

It had been an especial treat, allowing Djak to come today, to travel away from the farm in daylight.

"Wills," La Salle called to him from his seat below, the terrain and architecture too unfamiliar for him to feel comfortable moving around without a guide, "I have told Djak, and so I tell you as well: the time has come for making cider. I can smell it on the wind. Especially here, up higher than I usually climb, the distant winds converging at this place, carrying the news on it."

Stephen did not mention that he had deliberately been putting off the undertaking, it seeming to him (as in times of old) like a celebration, a harvest-task. And his heart (and those of Robin's men) heavier than any would admit at no news being able to be sorted about Mitch's mysterious whereabouts.

Allen's best contact had been transferred out of the Guernsey bailiwick, his other sources swearing ignorance of any Sarkese fisherman ever at Treeton, much less knowing where one had been presently put.

There had been a terrible stand-off one night where Royston briefly seemed to imply that it was no longer in Allen's best interest, as current lackey to the German occupiers, to spy for the unit - for Mitch - with any accuracy. That perhaps he had been drawing more than simply his earned wage from the Kommandant. Intimations of pay-offs, of betrayal, imploded like soundless bombs into the air.

Understandably this suggestion, however slight, however much the product of worried, over-tired minds all 'round, had not been taken lightly by Allen. And it had fallen to Robin three days later to seek out Dale at the Dixcart, smooth his wounded feathers and coax him into some version of a reconciliation with (an almost immediately repentant) Royston.

_Yes_, thought Stephen, _it was time for making cider_. He had, perhaps, delayed it too long.

* * *

**ALDERNEY -** Gisbonnhoffer recalled the first day he had set foot on Alderney. The haunted quality of it. There had only been, what? Seven? Six? _Six_ people that had not evacuated in the wake of the Reich's coming Occupation force. Six people. The rest of the island was like...he did not know with what to compare it.

Quiet, without sounds of any population. Even the birds, the animals, muted. Homes left as though families might return at any moment. Doors locked against the coming invader. Pets, livestock without keepers. Mail in the post office yet to be delivered to residents no longer in residence. Shops in villages with their wares on display but no one to sell to, a laundry with rows of men's shirts ready to be picked up. A butcher shop with its contents on the cusp of spoiling. A newspaper office with the press half set, ready for the next day's paper, never to feel the printer's devil roll ink over the letter tiles.

The perfect conquer job. Everything for the occupier: all the spoils, without the pesky national populace to contend with. Most beds on the island cleanly, crisply sheeted, as though made ready for visitors. Larders stocked, coal scuttles filled.

His mind recalled this to him as he walked into the island's abandoned central public archive, looking for Underlieutenant Diefortner among the stacks and cabinets of the collected civic records of Alderney's now-scattered population. Something in the air of the place easily gave away how long it had been since it had been used, opened up, bothered with at all - like one would imagine the undisturbed, airless tombs of the pharaohs.

In the end it was the slightly-better-lit area where Diefortner was at reviewing certain records that gave his position away.

"You have had success in your time on Sark?" the man of lesser rank inquired of Geis as way of a greeting.

"Success? On Sark?" Gisbonnhoffer strongly scoffed. "The place is anathema to the German mind. Efficiency to the Sarkese, doubtless, means bedding down your pigs with your children. Washing your clothes with your potatoes."

"And?"

"And possessing _no_ convenient (or even logical) centralized collection of your civic annals. Rather, letting each priest, each pastor - practically, each _pinner_," he spat the word, "keep the sole copy, the lone assertion or proof of such records within sundry ledgers scattered - without thought to rationally situating them - all about the island."

"Shelved inside their primitive privies?" Diefortner asked, dryly. "For when they have run short on paper?"

Never one to much relish a joke told by another - particularly the (to his mind) often self-congratulatory Diefortner - Gisbonnhoffer did not laugh. "The notion of the record in question being found there is a far-fetched one, to be sure," Geis spoke to reassure himself as much as to explain to the Underlieutenant. "Continue here, and I shall, with the Kommandant's blessing, hie myself to Guernsey, where he has made known I am to arrive to oversee the search of their records for marriages among women seventeen to twenty-one over the span of years you were similarly tasked to find. If it comes to it that we _must_ pore over Sark's cursed ledgers as well, we shall set Lamburg on having his pig farmers dig them up from ancestors' graves, their grandmothers' knickers and wherever else they might be hidden. We shall, finally, have found something of the Reich's work for _him_ to do." At his own joke at Lamburg's expense, Gisbonnhoffer gave a steeply slanted smirk.

Diefortner paused for a moment and looked up from his scanning of ruled pages. "A glorious cause it is, after all. But how will you know, of the assertions we will compile - how will you know which one concerns the Nightwatch? The Kommandant himself confessed he has no understanding of your method."

"I daresay it shall be apparent to all of us," Gisbonnhoffer lied to cover his true motivations, not liking to think how much of his hard-won reputation he had staked on the discovery of Marion's (utterly unrelated to the Nightwatch) imprudent early marriage. Not, in truth, liking to think he would discover anything, _or_, that he, in fact, _would_.

But, after much trying (and agonizing), he found that he could _not_ sleep, could not give himself over to true rest until he knew for certain whether the Sarkese fisherman had spoken truth. It had been weeks, the Nightwatch his only companion in those early hours. When he had finally hit on the notion of using the angle of searching for _her_ as a way to gain right of entry to search the islands' records, he embraced the scheme, not letting himself look too closely at what, in the end, it might gain (or lose) him professionally. He could only think of Marion. Of knowing for certain.

Of _knowing_ whether she had brought him so low over a transgression of which she, herself, was equally guilty. There was no reading it in her eyes. In his few trips back to Barnsdale since his final encounter with the fisherman, he had tried. But there was no alteration, no notable softening in her limited attentions to him. The deeper part of her now seemed beyond his comprehension. He second-guessed (in private) every word, every gesture, every interaction they shared. And so he was convinced, that, as would be any good German, he must put his faith in the record-keeping, in the paperwork. In the end, the documentation would out. The documentation would end his quandary - one way, or the other.

Again, he attempted to settle his reservations about this precarious lie spun to gain access to the islands' records. The Kommandant himself, after all, had stumbled more than once in the unmasking of the rebel broadcaster. And had not seen it affect _his_ position one bit. _Yet_.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - civic annals housed at The States -** Suit-clad civil servants scrambled among the elegantly shelved registers dating back to times so ancient gloves were required in the handling of them. Marriages blessed by French kings, by Angevin royalty, by suspect English princes promoted to king when their warrior brother had died on the throne.

It had fallen to Matthew, first attache to the Bailiff, to coordinate the sudden ransacking of the island's records; the Germans, as was their way, setting their caps for certain information they required (as was also their way: immediately).

He struggled to maintain order and calm among those reporting to him, corrected someone looking in the wrong place here, re-shelved a volume in its rightful place, there.

A courier found him like this. The man passed him a packet to sign for, addressed to the Bailiff. In the flurry and distraction of activity all about him, Matthew signed for the packet, absent-mindedly removing the tied string to open it.

The explosion so quickly engulfed him, those around him, and the Hall of Records, its papers easily devoured, happily feeding the blaze - that he had not even experienced a moment in which his mind had registered the name signed onto this inferno's calling card.

* * *

It was two hours later when Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer arrived to find - quite the opposite of what he had expected. Rather than being located and ready for his perusal, the entirety of the island's records were still smouldering (an untold number destroyed beyond reading), the Bailiff's attache dead, immolated nearly beyond recognition, numerous others present at the blast injured. The Bailiff hardly able to express himself.

Usually, Jodderick would meet him - promptly at the pier if he knew him to be coming. Here, Gisbonnhoffer had to seek the Bailiff out among the smoky rubble, those working to clear it.

"There has been...an accident," Jodderick stuttered in telling him.

"So I see," Gisbonnhoffer returned dryly, his mouth unable to swallow back his acute (and unacceptable) disappointment. "Tell me," Geis seized on the moment, on the Bailiff's discomfiture, "was Lady Marion ever, in your memory, wed when she was younger?"

"Lady? Why - " Jodderick's eyes contracted, even in his shocked state tripping over the peculiar question. "I think - I believe - there was a - a time when she was known to have been engaged," he shared. "P-possibly..." he sounded less certain.

It was enough for Geis. Guernsey's documents, his best hope, were lost to him now. Standing among the recently decimated archive, this was the best corroboration of the Sarkese fisherman's assertion that he was likely to receive. Certainly it was enough with which to confront her. Her treachery. With the mounting evidence of her disloyalty.

The voice of the unsteady Bailiff broke into his swiftly turning thoughts. "What will you do, about the Whichman?"

Gisbonnhoffer reacted to the name like he might at a persistently irritating fly. "The Whichman?"

"'Twas him who sent the package."

"Meant for you."

"Yes," Jodderick agreed. "You will pursue him? Pursue retribution for what he has brought about here?"

Geis did not have to survey the damage to know his answer. "There were Germans killed?"

The Bailiff's mouth worked a moment or two with no sound coming out of it. "No."

"Then, no," he spoke as he might to an idiot underling, one needing educating of correct protocol. "The Reich will not pursue reprisals in this instance. Nor will we waste both time and man-hours on tracking down an islander who clearly enjoys killing his own people."

"Though - though it is clearly - _obviously_ - a sign of Resistance? In direct payback for the Nightwatch killings? You will do nothing?"

Gisbonnhoffer looked the man straight in the face. "And neither will you," his voice fell as he moved his eyes significantly to the stretcher where the disfigured attache's body lay under a white sheet. "Have you not heard?" He gave the Bailiff a taste of the Reich's spin-ability, "more than one of the injured parties present has agreed to give evidence that your Matthew," he surprised himself by recalling the dead young man's name, "was himself the one fiddling with the explosives. And that it was his device - not yet delivered to you - that backfired."

The Bailiff blanched, his colorless face losing even more pigment. His skin became nearly transparent.

Gisbonnhoffer turned from the man he had once (proudly) imagined a friend, in the process irritated to notice the toe of his well-polished boot had been tainted with still-warm ash. With a solid stomp he attempted to shake it off.

_He_ was for Barnsdale. For Marion. For the truth. And the judgment such brought with it.

**...TBC...**


	23. Day of Judgment

**GUERNSEY -** Marion Nighten had not yet begun to dress for bed, but she found herself drawn to her wardrobe nonetheless. How roomy it seemed now, how nice and orderly, and no longer hiding anything - since she had removed her stash of liquor away to the Nightwatch windmill. There she had stowed it among the rest of her things, waiting in secret until it might be needed - but no longer by her, no longer by the woman who had often felt the necessity to make use of it to get through a day - a night - during this enduring occupation.

What a significant event it had seemed, packing it up into a rucksack and carrying it far away from Barnsdale House. The glass bottles' clinking reminding her with each step what she was about to do - the hope she was about to agree to embrace. The hope for coming days that would require nothing to get through them but that which she carried already within her. The hope for coming nights, and for sleep that came naturally, and needed no hurrying along, no tonic to ensure fright-free, unmemorable dreams.

She did not say the words out loud, did not share (for who could she share such with?) the notion growing within her, the understanding that she was again, in love with Robin Oxley. That, perhaps, she had never truly been _out_ of love with him.

She would not have often used the word giddy to describe herself, certainly would never have used it in the past years under Germany's thumb, but as she walked toward her bed to lay down for a moment (just like any twitterpated girl gazing at the emptiness that was her ceiling, filling it with thoughts of her beloved), she did notice she had to actively refrain from employing a waltzing gait.

The ceiling above her was blank, for all that it was elaborate in its moulding, but even in the scant cracks its plaster wore she could trace the lines of his face, the crinkle of his smile, the ridges of his now-hardened knuckles.

For the moment she was an idiot, and gave herself over to it - but not so much of an idiot that she allowed her thoughts to progress forward in time. No, she parsed out her happiness second by second, rationing it because she had no wish to send out something so newborn, so precious into what future she felt the world held. For her, for Robin, for lovers anywhere...

She had agreed (after much internal discussion) to let herself love like a lightning strike; instant, immediate and undeniable. Robin had, after all, died before - and under far less dire circumstances than they found themselves up against here. And the battle _they_ fought, the siege they currently endured, the siege of all that was right and good, was, she still believed, destined to fail. And so she would love (as she fought) in the now. The present all that could be won, that could even be endured.

It was how she had parted herself from the liquor. If she refused to acknowledge tomorrow, and the next day, and what new horrors, what new injustices they might bring - if she focused entirely on the moment at hand - she could live, she could breathe. She could, love. And she could give up those bottles of insurance against coming days when her life, her breath, her love, might well all be at risk.

It was to just these thoughts she unintentionally fell asleep - hair done, lipstick on, still in her riding jodhpurs and matching blazer.

* * *

Marion woke - she did not know how much later - to the door of her bedroom being thrown open with a significant degree of force.

She had not disengaged any of the lights in the room when she had accidentally dozed, and so she was able to see that the man striding with sour determination into her private chamber was Geis. He moved so quickly her sleepy eyes struggled to track him.

A heartbeat and a half later and he was at her bedside, throwing the cozy floral chair by her bed stand onto its side and going down to one knee, where he grabbed the hair at the base of her neck (not much there, despite the weeks of it growing out since Carter's shearing of it) and forcefully set his hot mouth upon hers.

Her mind began seeing little explosions, desperate for any insight as to what was going on. In the interim since she had broken their engagement, though he had on occasion spent time at Barnsdale (according to the code of Occupation it was still, after all, his house), he had been aloof and reserved, and her quite glad of it.

She was not fool enough to believe that he was no longer interested in her, but she had come to expect that any renewing of his former affections toward her would come gradually, tentatively, even. This assault was neither.

She felt herself begin to struggle (as one might for air when being unexpectedly dunked) the longer the forcible kiss lasted. And as he was finally pulling away, his mouth twisted into more of a bite than an affectionate salute.

Her breath did not immediately return to her, and though she thought best to mask it, she was not immediately able to bury the shock and disgust in her eyes at his aggressive imposition.

"Do you hear that?" he asked her. His face was only just removed from hers, his hand in her hair twisted to keep her own head from moving in its place.

"What?" she managed. She knew her eyes showed uncertain fear.

"That kiss spoke volumes. A little voice," he told her, "saying, 'Marion has a secret'. Saying 'Marion likes to feel better than others, above them - though her crimes are no less grave. No less _unforgivable_'," he lingered on the word, "'than others'.'" His mouth came together in a grim line.

At this declaration he looked at her, as if he expected some response. Confused and distracted by the mounting pain of her scalp, she had none.

Using her hair, he jerked her out of the bed and thrust her toward the bedroom door (quite the opposite of what she had expected him to do next).

Apparently having heard the commotion, Eleri came winging down the hallway in her nightclothes. "What is it? Is something - ?"

"Landser Thered!" Geis bellowed, his tone as loud as his jarring footfall in jackboots, taking no care if he disturbed the sleeping household.

A landser appeared.

"The Kommandant's daughter is to remain indoors."

The landser sharply nodded his understanding, and began marching Eleri back to her room when the door of Edward's chamber also opened, and Lord Nighten's eye could be seen in the crack.

Marion tried, from her position in front of Geis, to nod comfortingly to her father, to try and convince him everything was alright, and encourage him to return to his bed.

"Thered!" Geis again bellowed, now over his shoulder to where the landser had gone with Eleri. "The old man, too. House arrest for him as well."

"Sir!" Thered crisply agreed, closing the door to Lady Nighten's suite with efficient dispatch, Eleri secured inside.

Without further speech, Geis herded Marion out of the house with many forcible proddings, and toward the open paddock area in front of the animal barn.

She had no clear idea of what was happening, of what was possibly about to take place. Although she had witnessed him in a high temper before, she had never been the inciting cause, or the object of it. And she had no concrete idea as to why this night would be any different.

When they were in sight of the barn she saw three other soldiers there, men she did not know, and a Guernsey constable, Dunne, whom she did. Though the blackout was to be in effect, they queerly each held fiery torches, the light of them multiplying as they reflected off the whitewashed stone of the barn's side.

Marion's Nightwatch-informed mind momentarily suggested to her that the side of the barn looked a great deal like similar locations she had heard about where Islanders would been taken by Germans to be executed.

_Had Geis somehow - someway - deduced her Nightwatch alter ego? Had he worked out something of Robin and the stranded unit?_

Mitch_. Robin always said everyone broke. That no one could resist torture for long. Had Mitch broken? Given them up?_

And was this moment, this surreal night - lit like a pagan revel, a satyr's ring for dancing in the forest - was this to be her final view of the world?

"Hold her," Geis demanded of the soldiers, and strode off into the shut-up barn, returning with a bridled Dovecote.

He held the reins of the gentle woken-from-sleep horse as he looked at Marion.

His voice came out more like himself, less rough, without shouting. "Have I not kept you and your father in fine nick?" he asked her, illustrating Barnsdale House to the back of her. "Have I not protected you? As in '41, when everyone not island-born, when all officers of the Great War - _like your father_ - were deported...when reprisals at the rate of two for one were required for the Germans expelled from Persia? Did I not protect you then, when _those_ people were sent away to camps in Germany? Not even allowed to stay on here, not at the Alderney camps? Did I not?"

"Yes," she agreed, her voice thready as a spectre's. "Yes! You have done all those things. And you have our gratitude!"

"But not your _love_?" he asked, not waiting for her reply. "Not your loyalty?"

Before she could answer his pistol was out and he had sunk the first bullet into the strong Percheron's flank.

Dovecote startled and yelled with the pain, the unexpected cruelty.

Marion's heart seized.

"I have had your fisherman killed," Geis informed her, as though bragging, another bullet now into the draft horse's haunch.

"Oh, please. Please!" Marion begged him, her heart beating irregularly, her mind and reasoning a-tilt. "Kill her! Be merciful!"

"No." He spoke flatly and without affect. "Not used to hearing that, you spoilt brat? I am through doing as you wish. Try that on for size. I will not kill her. Instead, you will watch as she endures the pain of her oncoming death. And if you look away, I will have you forcibly positioned so that you may not."

Her distraction, her total concentration on what had been done to her beloved pet was so intense that she failed to register the tears of frustration, of confusion and horror bursting from her eyes. "So you will kill me?" she questioned him. "For - " she cast about for what had so angered him. "For dissolving our engagement?"

The soldiers on either side of her held her by the arms, preventing her, even, from wiping her own face.

"No!" Geis shouted.

She saw the torch blaze reflected in his grown-wild eyes.

"You think you can humiliate a man like me and get away with it? That you can...smugly gloat as I allowed you to bring me low? That I cannot _see_ through your sanctimonious charade, _Lady_ Marion? You, in your high-and-mighty self-righteous tower are as compromised as I." He scoffed forcefully through his nose.

She pled with him. "I do not know what you are speaking about. I do not know what you want from me. Tell me," she promised. "I will give it you!"

He stepped toward her, putting his face close, and on level with hers. "_Confess_." He pulled away. "That you were married before. That you are likely _still_ married." He raised his gloved hand and pointed his finger, accusingly, at her. "That you chose to punish and humiliate me for that which you are also guilty."

"No!" she denied it with as much force as she could muster, held there between his soldiers. "Never! Why would you think this? I am, and always have been, unmarried! This is madness!"

He turned to the side and buried a third and a fourth bullet into the horse, which, even in its labored breathing, screamed.

"Then I shall have Thered bring out your father. And we shall ask," his lopsided smirk grew up his jawline, "_him_."

Marion thought of her father. Of the fact he had not so long ago seen Robin. Of the undependability of his mind, of what he might say, or give away.

"No," she reneged on her immediately preceding denial, "You are right. I - I am discovered. Forgive me! It is true. I was married." She feared to say more, not sure what he expected her 'confession' to reveal.

Geis did not re-holster his pistol. She heard the armhole seams of her blazer tear from her struggling against the men tasked with restraining her. The buttons on its front long ago popped.

"And where is he now?" Geis continued his questioning. "This husband of yours? Whom I _know_ to be a soldier?"

"He. I. We. I." She fell back on a version of the truth. "We quarreled." Her head dropped and she shook it from side to side. "We are - no longer together."

Geis let go of where he had pointlessly still kept his grip on the collapsed horse's reins. He stepped toward her, his face near enough to hers for a kiss. "So you _have_ lied to me. How many other times?" He nearly spat the question. "About how many other things? The airman?"

"No," she told him. "No." She wished desperately she knew how better to convince him.

"What of the flier, Marion?" he demanded. "What of him? Did you lie about that, too? Perhaps _he _is your Islander husband? Perhaps your capture and torture a fraud? A sham? As is your falsely righteous indignation over my own marriage?"

Geis stopped his examination of her and cast his eyes from side-to-side in the open paddock where they stood. He re-holstered and stowed his pistol, gesturing to Constable Dunne to hand him one of the soldiers' torches where they had been thrust into the ground so that they could restrain her.

Geis took it in his hand, and before turning away, accused her. "How long have I been here? With you?"

Her eyes were now tearing from the closeness of the flame.

"Three years," he recalled to her. "Two winters. I have tended your estate. And yet, I have failed in all this to gain your respect? To deserve your loyalty?" He shook his head as if mystified.

He moved to the barn, closing the doors on first one end, waking through the barn's long row of stables to the opposite side and then closing the other, securing both with the drop-down planks from the outside.

For a moment nothing was apparent to Marion except that he had closed up the barn for the night.

And then from within, Gypsum began to bellow with fear. And the open tops of exterior stall doors began shortly to fill with firelight, ever increasing in its brightness as it was fed by the hay and straw stored within.

And the animals began to startle and shout from where they had been trapped inside.

And over it all it was as though someone had set the needle onto Verdi's great _Requiem_ and its _Dies irae_. The declaration of judgment pounding through her head like as though she were being stoned. Each powerful note, each ringing choral shout a stone's impact upon her flesh. "_Dies irae, dies illa_," the choir would chant forbiddingly, "_Dies irae, dies illa/Day of wrath, that dreadful day/the world will melt in ashes..._"

* * *

She hardly noticed when Geis removed himself and strode away from where she remained in the grip of his soldiers, to watch the barn, and all life that was within it, burn.

* * *

Gisbonnhoffer walked with purpose, planning to get himself back to the house, collect his right-hand man of late, Thered, and depart this place. He had not gone too terribly far when a figure streaked into him from out of the small woods.

It proved to be a disheveled Sir Edward.

"Herr Geis!" the elderly man beseeched him, grabbing at his arm, trying to pull him with him, on his way clearly bound for the now-blazing barn. "Marion! The barn! We must, we must rescue her!"

Geis did not take the time to explain to the dementia-prone elder statesman that his daughter was not within the barn. That she was, in point of fact, in no present danger whatsoever. He only thrust the man's dubious grip from him, nearly knocking the semi-invalid down, and continued on his determined path back to the house, his car, and the harbor with its waiting launch to Alderney.

* * *

"Here," she heard Constable Dunne speak to the Germans. "Get her to a tree, and we shall tie her in view of it. Good enough for the Lieutenant's liking. _I_ will then stay and watch her, and you may be about your other business."

The two soldiers looked to one another and agreed. And then, left.

"Help me," Marion petitioned Dunne once the other men had disappeared into the night. "Let me comfort her," she indicated the still dying Dovecote, nodding toward her with her head. "Or at least, kill her yourself. _Help me_. Let me into the barn. Let me attempt to rescue the others."

"Lady Marion," he told her, an unpleasant-to-see pragmatism in his expression, "I will not risk my life for horse nor barn. No matter how cheaply the Germans think of us Islanders. Now, you've come to no harm, here. And I mean to see you further kept from it. I will do as Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer ordered. And then I will see you safely back to the house."

* * *

Because Edward came at the barn through the moderate cover of the small woods, his arrival was not immediately apparent to Marion, nor to the soldiers at that time still tasked with watching her and the ever-growing conflagration. Sir Edward had the plank swing up and off its rest, and managed to pull the door wide.

A huge belch of smoke burst from out of the barn, the flames rising higher at the intake of new oxygen his venting of the blaze provided.

"Marion!" he wailed, and in the fire's light _then_ she saw him, her screams at him to stop - that she was there, beyond the fire's danger, lost to him in the nearby noise of the inferno and the dying animals.

She thrust herself against the binding's grip, screaming for her father, tearing the inside of her throat in the process, great coughings coming from her lungs where they had begun gulping smoke as the wind changed.

Constable Dunne's posture spiked at recognizing that it was Sir Edward running into the flames. "It may be that I will not risk my life for livestock nor edifice, but Sir Edward is quite another matter," he told Marion, and took off for the blazing interior.

It was likely not a long time before he again came out, but the ensuing moments played like three lifetimes to her. She saw Constable Dunne exit the barn, something draped over his shoulder. At first she thought, foolishly, that it was Gypsum's saddle, until she realized it was the frail body of her father.

Dunne laid him on the grass, not far from Dovecote, and moved to slice Marion's ropes, and free her from the tree.

She was to her father's side before she even had time to discern if he were still breathing. He was. But only just.

"Marion," he spoke to her, his voice shallow, but his eyes bright with unaccustomed lucidity.

"Oh, Father," she said, not knowing how to explain to him what was going on, what was taking place here - what was shortly - it was obvious to her - about to take his life.

"I have seen Robin," he told her, and for a moment she feared she had imagined the understanding and comprehension in his face. "I do not know how he came to be here, nor how it is that he is not dead as we were told, but I thank God he is here to be with you. Even as I - even as I - "

"Shhh," she told him. "Do not try to speak."

"Do not try to speak?" he asked her, a shine of his old vim in his incredulity. "What sort of encouragement is that coming from a man's best speechwriter, eh? His political muse?"

She did not mean to, but she half-laughed. He sounded so much of himself - of his old, greatly-missed and mourned self.

"You are my Egeria," he said. "You must never doubt it." He reached about for her hand. "But even so, in this world - in what our world has become, I do not know you at all, do I? The things you have accomplished for us here. The care you have taken. The risks - "

"No," she wished to assure him. "I am myself. And, as always, yours."

He patted her hand. "There is much in my life I fear I should not have done. Especially in regards to you, my dearest girl. A girl, after all, needs her mother," he took a ragged breath. "But I could not take back my writings. _Our_ monograph."

She did not have to ask which one.

"When you see her again, be kind." His eyes shone with the thought of his still-beloved wife. "And cultivate generosity towards her - if not on your own account, then on mine." He tried to nod, but his head only shook with tremor in the effort. "Yes?"

She nodded, not caring what she was agreeing to, only happy to hear him speak.

"I think. I think I have been a prisoner here, here in this place that I have loved since a child. A prisoner on this island, and, of my own mind. And though I know myself in this moment, and I know you - and your mother, and Clem to be in London - I am still a man in a world he no longer understands. Events have outpaced me," he tried to smile, "outstripped any perspicacity I might have saved for understanding them." His voice gained an unexpected infusion of vigor in his speech. "But I know; if I leave this world in _your_ hands, for I had ever trained you for just such a task, if I must leave, and you must carry on - _Marion, you must carry on. You_ are my greatest contribution, my best legacy. You will help see it put to right. Carry a little of me with you as you do it, yes?"

"Yes, Father, whatever you say."

"Is it alright?" he asked her, the vigor, the impassioned tone gone, "alright to close my eyes now? To sleep?"

"Yes, my darling," she encouraged him, though she would have given her own life's blood to keep his eyes open, clear, and upon her. "Sleep, now. Oh, sleep," she choked back a sob, cradling his head. "It is good to dream."

"My best dreams have always been saved for you, my sweet girl," and he closed his eyes with a shallow sigh, and breathed no more.

* * *

At some point Constable Dunne had left them like this, father and daughter, and took himself off from their vicinity so that they might have privacy in their final conversation.

It was he who came to her and let her know he thought they might return to the house now, wake some of the staff to come out for Sir Edward's remains.

"No," she told him, roughly, jerking her arm away from his comforting hand, the side of her face reddened in the light of the still-burning fire, the other side deeply enshadowed, chiaroscuro. "I will not return to _that_ house as long as I live."

She knelt and kissed her father, sorry to leave him so, to leave him there, alone, and tore off into the woods, not caring if the Constable followed her in an attempt to enforce the curfew or not.

_Come now_, she told herself as she ran, _come now, come now, come now. Things to do, things to do, lives to save. Lives to save_, she chanted to herself, half-holding her breath, knowing that if the Nightwatch did not broadcast as expected further death could be the outcome.

And she knew she could not leave the reporting of the fire, and news of her father's death to the Germans, who would find some way to sully it - to use it to their own ends. She would not let them do so. _She_ would fire the first volley. The people of Guernsey would know the truth.

Her relief upon reaching the windmill was total. She knew she would need something to steady herself, something to empower her to distance herself, if only for that hour, from what had just happened, and pull off a broadcast.

She recalled her liquor. She tried not to recall the foolish thoughts she had been indulging in earlier in the evening where its banishment was concerned.

She poured amounts into three glass jars at once, lined them up in front of herself, and half-saluting each, raised them one at a time before letting them pass, without truly swallowing, over her tongue.

"Dovecote. A gentle beauty," she announced to no one. _Down_.

"Gypsum. The originator of our present troubles," she referenced his throwing of her father, which had first brought her to the island, "but I loved you nonetheless, my lad." _Down_.

Her hand shook a little as she set down the second jar.

"Sir Edward, Lord Nighten," she said, perhaps somewhat louder, still to no one. "Defender of Right, Paragon of Good, the King's own man." She raised the third glass jar high as though a filled pub were present before her, and her standing drinks for them in memory of her father. "You were worth every moment - " She stalled out, her grip on the jar tightening. She thrust it to her mouth, and let its contents slip down, her hand still seized upon the drinking vessel. When she brought it away from her lips, faster than the excess could dribble onto her chin, she threw it, dashing it into the stone foundation of the mill, where its everyday thickness shattered with a dull clatter nothing at all like the crystal that should have been used in the saluting of such a man.

* * *

It was the hardest task to simply locate records with songs she thought she might play. Had her eyesight been less impaired perhaps it would have proven easier.

"God Save the King, Vive la France, and God Bless America. It's two o'clock...and welcome to the Nightwatch." She uncharacteristically found she had to clear her throat. "We begin with local news tonight, y'all," she spoke over the airwaves. "For those of you looking out tonight, you will see our top story, as earlier this evening the Jerries decided to torch the horse barn at the Barnsdale estate, destroying livestock, hay and straw, as well as rendering various farm implements useless - and (as we have grown to expect) robbing fuel-desperate Islanders of using the barn's structural wood in the heating of their homes. Additionally, it has been reported via reliable sources that Sir Edward, Lord Nighten, owner and resident of the estate, lost his life in the ensuing blaze while trying to rescue his daughter, whom he believed to have been trapped within. No information about services or his internment is available as of airtime."

When she finished she felt as though she had been at holding her breath under water for fifteen minutes.

She sat a moment and waited for her ears to pop. Like an automaton, glassy-eyes, disengaged, she spun record after record. Gave news updates twice, but before the end of the hour she was facedown, unconscious beside the mike, empty bottle on its side near her right hand.

* * *

Thirty minutes after the Nightwatch would usually have reliably concluded, the figure of a man stole down the steep stairway into the half-cellar of the windmill. When he caught sight of Marion passed out, her head down on the crate that held her microphone, his heart went out to her. The two glass jars and various bottles of liquor were still set out in easy distance of her reach. One bottle, drained of its contents, had capsized near her hand.

He stepped to the mike, certain to disengage the transmit button, then moved to lift the needle off the record where it had caught in a faulty groove, and had been at repeating (and broadcasting) the same phrase for over twenty minutes.

Despite his understandable worry at finding himself here, out past curfew, consorting with someone involved in clear resistance, he did not hurry himself to be about business so much that he could not stroke back her hair from her face, and pat it where it lay, there, behind her ear.

He squatted down to be on level with that ear.

"Lady Marion," he encouraged her. "Come now, we must be away. _Come_."

She opened her eyes slowly, recognizing the voice before fully recalling where she was or what had happened. She smelled quite a lot of liquor, not realizing it was on her own breath and in her own pores.

"Mr. Thornton?" she asked, as she might have done as a child, stopping by his cottage on one of her woodsy tramps to ask for a drink of water.

"Yes, Child," he assured her unfocussed eyes. "Come with me."

Without protest, she did.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** With respect, further chapter updates will not be posted until 15 June at earliest. Thank you for your understanding. 


	24. St Peter Port Boudoir

**GUERNSEY - St. Peter Port -** There was nothing particularly tender about Ginny Glasson as she re-arranged the sheeting on her modest bed, but then neither did she bustle as to disturb its remaining occupant with her tidying.

The man publicly known as Joss Tyr had, after all, only a scant two hours ago joined her there (herself dutifully tucked in, as usual, following the Nightwatch).

She had by now grown used to her pillowcases and bedding showing signs of his presence in the more intimate areas of her life. Try as he might, he seemed unable to reliably remove _all_ his stage paint, and some bit of it here, or smudge of it there, would show up, like a child had been left unsupervised with a painter's pastels in the bedroom.

There were even times she had noticed he would sweat the paints out, her not daring to ask him what ingredients his masking make-up might hold that his pores would so willingly take it in, and later, weep in rejection of it.

She moved toward the porcelain pitcher and matching basin that had been her grandmother's, on its stand in the small room's corner. The pitcher kept water cool for washing, and she checked to see that it was doing so now in preparation of Tyr's rising several hours hence.

She threw a glance back over her shoulder to him - the room never truly dark enough (the curtains never thick enough) for sleeping much after dawn - facedown in the bed, his back bared to the waist where only the sheet further protected his (at the word she almost laughed to herself) modesty.

He was not at all a handsome man by any definition, despite what might have been said of Count Werner von Himmel before his accident. There was no longer anything smooth or boyish about his features. And when his face was bare of paint, it was easy to see how the stress of pain and wear of frustration had carved a new face for him.

On a lesser man the facial scarring he retained from his accident might have gone largely unnoticed or forgotten, had he chosen to attempt to grow a beard over it. Instead, it had become part of the landscape of his face, as a performer his instrument, his canvas. The map of his commentary on the fractured world around him.

Theirs was not the intense relationship of intimate confessions and deeply shared personal secrets that it might have been had they been younger - had both their scars been less deep. But though he had never alluded to it, Ginny had known enough men in her life to know that - in his mind - the accident he had survived was the unmanning of him. And that there was good and abundant reason he removed the paint from his face only for the hours he spent alone with her in her modest boudoir.

Even so, she knew he was never fully relaxed with bare face in the presence of anyone.

She was too smart not to know that losing fingers and range of motion in one's hands would leave _anyone_ feeling at times to have been made a monster - but for an illusionist, a soul with an artistic bent and thirst for wonder and beauty in the world around them, to be damaged so would be only next door to waking up a cockroach.

He must have heard her at the washstand.

"What news?" he asked her, opening neither eye. He sought to know, as his stage act conflicted with the Nightwatch broadcast.

She smoothed the back of her skirt self-consciously, in a womanish way wanting to appear her best, in case he might glance up at her. "Two fires," she reported to him. "Guernsey ablaze, last night."

"Two?" he asked, with surprise. The first eyelid cracked open. Even in sleep he kept the worse-scarred side of his face hidden, flat to the pillow.

She turned around, the washstand towel in her hands. "The archives at The States are still smouldering. And the Nightwatch reported the enemy had torched barns on the Knighton estate, leading to the death of Sir Edward. You have heard of him?"

Tyr rubbed at his eyes as he sat up in the bed, careful not to irritate the ever-sensitive skin of his scarring. "Certainly. I have read his monograph. _After_ the published re-cant, of course. Prior to that few Germans had heard of him outside government circles. There was a boldness to his convictions I admired."

Ginny walked back to the bed, standing at its foot.

"And the Bailiff?"

She was surprised it had not been the first question he had asked. "Jodderick lives."

In a rare moment of speaking the tongue of the Fatherland in front of her, Tyr swore. "So it is another failure."

Ginny neither agreed nor disagreed with his pronouncement. "The civic archive is said to be a shambles, the job of putting them to rights unlikely, if not all but impossible, under the Occupation. Documents lost forever. History now ash."

He chose to take issue with her summation. "We cannot worry ourselves over history, Gin," he declared. "Not when it is the _future_ we seek to reclaim, to shape."

"No," she agreed with him, "we cannot. But the Bailiff's attache, Matthew, he will have no future now. He is dead."

Momentarily Tyr re-took the measure of his Occupation paramour, a woman he had (satisfyingly) yet to see flinch in her dedication to overthrow the Occupation. A woman long-proven in her commitment to liberation, a Guernsey partisan among the upper echelon of the islands' organized Resistance network. "Your reaction to the death of a clear collaborator seems uncharacteristic to me."

She did not know how to explain to him - a man no longer with a country, a man stripped of any compassionate understanding he might once have had the capacity for - the connections of home and state, and neighbor. That those Islanders scorned as collaborators (and certainly she scorned them) were her people, her Islands' soul. Her cousin, her milkman, her dead husband's best friend. And that while despising the way they fearfully capitulated to the enemy, she at the same time (as might a mother) greatly pitied and, even, loved them for their weakness. "We knew him," she said of Matthew. "He and my eldest son were quite close friends as boys. He was a sweet child."

Tyr made no response to this emotional connection she had with the deceased, nor had she expected him to. The device, of course, had been meant for Jodderick. But in the scheming (and he in the constructing) of it, both knew there was a likelihood it would not reach its true target. Though in his planning, Tyr expected even a mis-fire to accomplish the large part of his purpose: to alert Islanders there was an immediate and very final price to be paid for consorting with the enemy. That standing by for something such as the Nightwatch killings would neither be tolerated, nor forgiven.

Though she did not expect a sympathetic response from him, she added, "Lady Marion has lost her father and part of her home."

There may have been something of a school master in his tone when he reminded her, "...An even _clearer_ collaborator, Gin."

"As anyone asked would say of me, Count," she reminded him, using his noble title. "I wonder, have you read Dumas-pere? _Le Comte de Monte Cristo_?"

She knew she was out-of-sorts today. Matthew's death had put her so. Doubtless she was distressing her lover with this momentary bubbling up of scruples, coming from the woman he knew better as a determined partisan and skilled Pimpernel, than an Islander siding with her people. "With your appetite for retribution you ought to do," she encouraged him toward the book. "But be mindful. At the novel's end he loses the princess, _and_ the woman he once loved, and finds his exquisite revenge a cold comfort."

Had they been a different sort of a couple, in a different sort of a time, he might have taken that moment to draw her down on the bed to him, assure her he would do all in his power not to lose either any past love they had shared, nor any to come in future. He might have forsworn revenge. _She_ might have cradled his head to her breast lovingly, and spoken to him of a life they might make together. But they were not that couple, and these were not those times.

Instead he told her what she already knew. "I do not intend to live long enough to experience any such regret. Or anticipate a future filled with love, rejection, or comfort - cold or otherwise. I intend to fulfill the Whichman's prophecy, which as you know, I wrote myself. I will live only as long as it takes to see the enemy defeated, destroyed - purged from these islands, this planet. _Then_ I will be done. _Then_ I will sleep. Without dreams."

"I _have_ not such luxury, Count," she told him. "Because _I_ love too much things in this present world. My sons tether me here, the hope of one day again seeing them no longer as soldiers, seeing them go on to happy lives, in a world liberated of this present evil. _That_ keeps me here. It motivates my participation in The Work, but also robs me of the single-mindedness of your zeal. For you love nothing."

Speaking baldly, as they always did between themselves, he contested her pronouncement of him. "I loved Avia, I think," he told her, referencing his prized dove, and presently missing Resistance courier. "But I think we must believe her lost, possibly to a falcon I am told Sark's ReichKaptain has acquired, with whom he enjoys hunting. I do not know that I shall ever see her again."

"And she loved you, that much was clear," Ginny agreed with him, thinking of how the animal had doted on her master.

"If I had any sorry left, Gin," he took her hand in one of his, presently absent its first-finger prosthetic. "I would be sorry for not being able to tell you truthfully that I love you." He kissed its back elegantly, as he might have during the height of his days among the German aristocracy.

"I do not know if there is room left in this present world for such a love," she agreed, returning to her usually less-morose self. "I think we have found - or made - room for what we have. Moments of pushing back the darkness. Acceptance of one another..."

"The occasional gift of peeling off our masks?" He half-smiled at her reaction to his having noticed that she, also, wore one. "Of physically reconnecting with whatever humanity they have left us with?"

She lightly pushed against his bared shoulder, skin on skin reminding them both of the relieving sensual connection they unabashedly shared without illusions within these four walls.

She increased the pressure on his shoulder to encourage him to lie back down in the bed. "Best get back to sleep, Count," she told him, the sunlight in the room having shifted to alert her of the passing of time, and that the hour was soon to arrive when she must open her shop below to customers. When she must open her ears to further learn what she could of the night before.

"I will endeavor to be as quiet as they say is a church mouse," he promised her, ensuring their months-long tryst continued to go unnoticed.

"As ever you are," she agreed with him, finding the smallest chip in the lacquer on one of her nails, and seeing yet another task to add to her always briskly busy day.

**...TBC...**


	25. Waking  FBs 1937 KY and London

**GUERNSEY - Cottage of Mr. Thornton -** On the cusp of that very action, she thought of waking. Swam in the memories of waking, her pathway through them uncluttered, but winding, indirect. The worst day of waking: she had no idea how she had managed to be brought back to the Otto home following Fred's reading of Clem's world-shattering telegram.

_A home_. The Otto family at times might refer to it as house, as in, 'ya'll, let's git back up to the house,' but never as 'the House', as her English peers were wont to do with their own manors and grand abbeys. Then again, the Otto house was unnamed, its history trailing back but two generations beyond the present one - and one of them, still living yet. She had often thought, that as opposed to having lost their pretenses, the Ottos perhaps had never (bless them) had any with which to begin.

The knock on the door of her borrowed bedroom was muted, but regular in its appeal. When she had finally ignored it one time too many for the knock-er, the door opened without her consent. Beyond the door, it was somewhere between day and night (or night and day) outside. She could not have said how many hours or days she had passed in the bed of her borrowed room alone, undisturbed, as, she supposed, the Ottos' lives carried on.

"Marion?" she heard Josie Otto's voice call, like that of her older brother's, morphing its pronunciation into more 'Marin'. "Time to dress, now, Honey."

When Marion found _her_ voice it sounded creaky to her, ancient as a little-used crypt door. "I am not coming down for dinner, Joes."

Queerly, without asking permission, Josie pulled Marion's steamer trunk from where it was stowed in the attached dressing room, and began to empty drawers and pack dresser-tops of Marion's things into it. "You'll eat at the station in Lexington," Josie assured her. "Fred's got y'all tickets on the four-fifteen to Washington."

For the first time since she had arrived in the United States and declared her independence from the Mertons, Marion felt she did not have the capacity to accomplish something on her own. "But I don't know - I can't - " she tried to tell Josie, having misunderstood the Southerner's use of 'y'all' - this time in the plural.

"Well don't be silly, Honey," the younger girl assured her. "Tick_ets_. Fred'll go with you. He's worked it all out. The only thing left is for y'all to dress y'self."

Josie's compassionate face came to rest its gaze on Marion's, "and if you need help with that, my two hands are available."

* * *

Later, so many miserable, desolate wakings later, having disembarked Lucky George's shady vessel after her surreptitious Crossing, Marion had boarded a public bus at the port, a bus bound for London. She had never traveled so un-chaperoned, so freely, in her own country before.

Upon arriving at the London depot, rather than ring Nighten House to have a car sent, she had asked a helpful porter to engage her a taxi.

"Mayfair," she had told the cabbie. "I will give you the street and house number when we are closer." And she had fallen asleep.

When he woke her (clearly troubled by his having to do so), she looked out the hack's rear window only to see the Nighten residence (coincidentally) directly across the street from where the cabbie, undirected, had parked the car.

The elegant white stone of its edifice, the impressive windows and multiple stories. Even, the impressively reserved cast-iron railing leading down to the servant's entrance, which matched the cast-iron railings ringing the trunk of each tree lining the sedately graceful street.

_A late night caller, moonlight on crooked silver sitting amok in the roadway. Only a set of men's pajamas between her skin and buttercream leather_.

Her eye found its way to a particular tree, and she changed her mind. "The city of Westminster," she redirected him, "Cleopatra's Needle."

"Wot?" the mostly-patient cabbie barked to her at this odd change of destination. "M'I gonna unload your baggage there?"

"Take me, and then agree to return me here," she pointed to the townhouse, "_with my baggage_, and you shall be well compensated for your time. _And_ inconvenience."

Money ever music to a cabbie's ears, he drove her as she had asked. She gave him more than enough when they arrived to agree to the park the car and wait for her, out of view of the Needle.

* * *

**Late Summer 1937 -** Upon receipt of the note delivered from the Tripp Club, she had flown from the house like an exultation of larks, her mind and person similarly as scattered. _Robin. Home from holidaying. Robin. In London. As was she. Robin!_

Though there had been an obvious threat of summer rain when she departed the Mayfair house's front door, she had paid the weather no note, her heart too light to imagine burdening it down with anything at all, even an umbrella on the arm.

She was an emotional wreck, but far too happy to let it worry her. She was elated, she was a ball of nerves. She felt a piercing fear that she could no longer recall what Robin looked like. Perhaps she had best turn around and return to study his portrait one last time before setting off.

_Nonsense!_ Such was her hurry she could not wait for the car to be brought 'round for her use, and got herself down the street, to the corner as quickly as possible, and managed (quite shockingly, even to herself) to hail a cab.

She saw the ancient obelisk's point - jutting over sixty feet into the London sky, even in the overcast weather - before she saw him, waiting, pacing at the base of it.

Her heart quickened with recognition. No longer any fear, there.

Only minutes before her arrival on scene, the heavens had opened, and poured down a rare, warm summer shower, so committedly that his coat and clothing were past being soaked. He had no umbrella on his person, but certain that his roadster was nearby, and unwilling to merely watch him from over a distance a single second longer, she burst from the cab, without even the driver's assistance in stepping onto and down from the running board, and dashed to Robin so quickly she was confident the pelting raindrops could not even have found purchase upon her.

Once he saw her coming, Robin waited for her to come to him, letting her rocket herself into him, into his arms, as he relished the nearly-empty streets - courtesy the downpour - and the unabashed public display of affection it won him on Marion's (usually reserved) part.

Instantly, he buried his soaked face and hair into her neck, the splash of scent she had applied there before departing not wasted on his senses.

"Why here?" she asked - his head still to her shoulder - dying to know. "Why would you not come at once to the house?"

"Let me look at you first," he said, pulling away from their embrace, holding her at arm's-length, his eyes having to squint slightly to see in the continuing onslaught of rain.

Instinctively she brought her hand up to try at smoothing her hair. As it had done shortly for him, no observer could now accurately tell how long she had herself stood in the warm downpour, so soaked-through she was already, the starch in her blouse a mere memory, the fresh flower on her collar both wilted by the rain and falling apart from their embrace, her impeccable nylons splashed over with the street's dirt and grime. The rolls of her stylish hairdo dripping rain onto her forehead.

"You are a picture," he told her, utterly captivated by the look, the arrival of her. "Were Wren here, I would commission your portrait."

Even in her joy at seeing him, a small crease graced her brow, and she reminded him hesitantly, "but he was an architect."

"And it is building I have on my mind," he offered in rejoinder. "Why here, you ask? Why meet here after these weeks separated by the Channel? Because I found I wished to erect a monument to the happiest day of my life."

Through the rain he winced up, trying to sight the obelisk's point.

"The happiest...day of your life?" she asked him, her heart flipping at what such a declaration might forebode.

"But I did not long for the woodlands, or countryside, which despite their beauties are too far away. And certainly, there is little enough room for wild, untethered happiness in a drawing room. I need my monument, my touchstone, to be nearby me at all times. Here, in London. Where it might be frequently visited, even sighted over a great distance. It had, of course, to be pleasing to the eye, large, and as close to eternal as anything in all Britain might be."

"And so we are here."

The rain slackened a bit.

"I could not have found a more perfect memorial for this moment had I designed and carved this stone pillar myself, Marion, and yet, I find myself shaking - having nothing to do with the damp and the rain. Only, I find (mostly shockingly to myself) I am afraid. Frightened by happiness. Frightened by acknowledging a happiness so intense that even in this moment I fear what might come were it ever taken away from me."

It was hard to say how it had come about. She had hardly noticed as her head had to bend to keep him in her sights as he moved onto but a single knee placed to the pavement.

"My dearest; I have no desire to spend even the length of a dance in the arms and company of any other woman." He popped up and took his hand to smooth back a stray hair of hers, always taunted into frizz and curls in humidity. "_Curly locks_," he began, and surely, as any schoolchild, she knew the rest by heart. "_Wilt thou be mine?_" He left off his quotation before getting to dishes or swine, or the promise of a lifetime of idle embroidery.

"Yes," she told him in English, nodding her head, continuing on by verbalizing her mental list of the seventeen other languages she had researched in his time away, giving vehement 'yes'es in every one.

By the time she got to Swahili, and began again in the dead Gothic tongue, he had had enough, and stopped her mouth, and its verbosity of affirmation, satisfyingly, with his own.

She did not squirm, nor did she try to cut his kiss short, despite its being publicly administered.

Each tasted the rain on the other's lips.

"Oh, yes," Robin said, remembering, fumbling in his pocket, his searching of it complicated by the wet fabric not wishing to comply and part, but rather to adhere to itself. "I had forgotten."

As he searched, he look at Marion's face. "'_A Robin and a Robin's son_," he recited, meaning his father and himself. "_Once went to town to buy a ring/They could not decide on clear or blue/And so the Robins brought both back home to you'_." His fingertips located the unboxed ring and managed to pull it forth, bringing the inside-out pocket lining with it. "I daresay Father did not approve, and the House of Cartier only _just_, but I chose blue for your eyes, and a quadrumvirate of diamonds. _One_ for each of our children," he prophesied, intently holding her gaze.

He squinted up into the clouds still very present overhead. "My car is still at Kirk Leaves, in the North Country," he apologized with a shrug and chuckle. "A ceremonial dousing was not _meant_ to be an integral part of the day's celebrations."

"I do not care," she told him, shaking her head to make the drops fly out of her now-dissembling hair. "Fair weather or foul," she slipped into quoting _MacBeth_, "when shall we _two_ meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?"

"An ill omen, surely, my love," he cautioned her, but with a bold smile at his lips, "to speak words of such a bloody play on this day of all days. But, I will, as you shall have it. No matter what may come, _this_ shall be our forever rally point, our memorial to happiness: _Marion's Needle_. Like you it?" he asked, attempting to show it off to her with an outthrust arm, his other firmly about her waist.

She laughed at his theatrics. "It is the way you sell it," she agreed. "But I far prefer, 'Robin's Needle'."

"Hieroglyphics and antiquarians be damned," he declared, "had I my trusty penknife I'd have our initials cut into it within the hour."

"Shhh - " she giggled, wary that someone (though the pavement traffic was nearly non-existent) might overhear his threat to deface the ancient Egyptian obelisk that, in point of fact, significantly pre-dated even Cleopatra's storied reign.

* * *

**November 1939 -** Marion walked away from where she had bought the cabbie's present idleness on her behalf. There was not so much as a hint of rain over all London, and in specific the City of Westminster was uncharacteristically positively blazing with sunlight.

The stone obelisk cut a sharp path into the cloudless sky above it. For all that it was impressive, it was so terribly - stone. So cold and without emotion; unlike Rodin's _The Burghers of Calais_, St. Margaret's in Lothbury's statues of blissfully frolicking cupids - A.G. Walker's reverential monument to Emmeline Pankhurst, even.

_Why had he chosen this?_ Yes, of course she recalled his reasons. Recalled, she thought, far too much of that happiest day of his - of her - life. But when she gazed on the monument he had chosen to their happiness, it now seemed more like a dagger to her, a crude, early Roman short sword, edged to maim, if not kill, all who approached it. Cutting, even, into Heaven itself.

Or perhaps it was not so enduring as once-thought. Perhaps it was nearly set to crumble. Stone into dust. Dust into ashes. The taste now day-and-night within her mouth.

She turned her back on it, in her haste to put it behind her nearly stumbling in her shoes.

Back to the taxi, and the waiting cabbie. Back to Mayfair, a failure, aged and empty before her time.

* * *

The cab pulled up in front of the Nighten residence, stopping appropriately at the curb, her baggage and trunk unloaded from it before she had a chance to repent her arrival.

The cabbie accepted his fare from her and left.

She stood, abandoned on the pavement, knowing how it would dismay her mother to see that her daughter's bags were stacked unceremoniously curb-side, as opposed to having been brought in through the servant's entrance by Nighten-employed footmen before the bags' leather had ever had a chance to touch the ground.

But of course the cabbie hadn't known, hadn't usually accepted fares to tony Mayfair. Hadn't known to wait until Nighten staff attended upon their arrival, until the Housekeeper settled the fare and any tip with him directly.

Marion ascended the twenty-or-so stone steps and rang the bell.

The massive door swung open, revealing their town butler.

"Ettlestone," she greeted him with a nod.

"Lady Marion," he responded, his jaw gone quite slack, his eyes showing an emotion she had never before encountered in him. Unlike his usual, highly-efficient self, he did not immediately move to one side to allow her entree.

"Lady Marion," he said again. And had she not spent time so recently among the emotionally demonstrative Ottos, she would not have realized that he was (as the reserved, respectable head-of-staff) at fighting back the urge to embrace her.

His training kicked in, and he extended a hand with which to take her hat. Instead of surrendering it to him, she (the new Marion, no longer the Marion that had departed this house) extended her hand and placed it momentarily within his. Ettlestone's eyes looked over to hers, and took on a momentary cast of both comfort and empathy at her brief gesture.

"You are...in America," he told her, his trembling voice struggling to reconcile with his refined demeanor. "We had not expected you, Ladyship."

"No, I daresay," she agreed absently, stepping inside toward the foyer's impressive, round pedestal table. The same familiar vase sat upon it, at present overflowing with fresh, brilliantly violet sweet flags.

"I will go and tell Lady Miranda of your arrival," he offered, and she found it queer to hear her mother referred to by her birth title, rather than that of 'Lady Nighten', the designation she had had to relinquish in the finalized divorce (though Marion knew that many of her friends still addressed her by it).

"Would you not, please, rather call down Master Clem?" she asked, preferring that meeting to a maternal one.

"Oh," Ettlestone, as ever, hated to disappoint. "Master Clem is not in this afternoon. He is was called to King Charles Street with his work. We are told to ring him there should the need arise."

"And Father?" she asked.

"Still at the Island," the butler confirmed, with a nod. "There has been talk that he may attempt compiling his papers to assay his memoirs."

She had allowed Ettlestone to lead her upstairs to her mother's private drawing room, reserved only for callers on the most intimate of terms.

In heading there they passed the turning she would usually take to arrive at her own bedchamber, and her mind strayed for a moment thinking of her bed, there. Of sleep, and privacy.

_Oh, once asleep, how was she to ever wake again?_

It was only Freddy's talent for forward motion that had kept her going, kept her so reliably on her feet in the weeks since the telegram. Even on Lucky George's ship she had felt him across the waters, holding her up, buoying her so that she might travel through the coming days until landfall.

But in his way Freddy was lost to her now, nearly as finally as was Robin. Her own successful Crossing was unlikely enough. It was utterly implausible that in the current climate of war he would (or could) dare to risk his own.

* * *

She heard the familiar, muted knock Ettlestone gave once at her mother's door.

"Enter," Lady Nighten - Lady Miranda - called in reply to it.

And so they did, Marion without noticing any strength in her own legs in the movement. _What was she doing here? Why on earth had it seemed right that she return here?_

"Lady Miranda - " Ettlestone began to announce her, but Marion rounded the doorway more quickly than he could speak.

"_Damnation_," Marion heard her mother say, never having heard her utter a swear word in her entire life prior. Her mother had spoken it crisply, daintily, even, as though it were a perfectly acceptable way for a Lady to express herself.

Lady Miranda smoothly, but with all speed, replaced her Limoges teacup and its saucer soundlessly on the silver tray from which they had been taken. She took a quickly-assessing look at her daughter and, without rising from where she sat, instructed the butler. "Lord Nighten's liquor cart _at once_, Ettlestone."

Lady Miranda never touched liquor of any kind. Often even turning down liquer-based desserts when they were offered to her.

Marion felt like her eyes could not blink quickly enough to take it all in, her mother's efficient, dependable taking-charge of the moment.

The short walk up the stairs to the drawing room seemed to have sapped whatever strength _Marion_ had left. "My steamer trunk and baggage," she confessed. "The taxi has left them all on the pavement."

She had expected her mother to decry the horror of this, the outrage and unacceptability of a Nighten engaging a cab, rather than ringing for the car. She did neither.

"By all means, Ettlestone," her mother commanded, sounding more of an army general than a society matron, "clear the pavement of them, lest Gypsies wander in and traipse off with Lady Marion's best _colliers_. Call my maid to draw a bath - steaming! Ring Master Clem that he is to return home at once, as his sister has arrived from America."

In short order, the room seemed to be teeming with staff; a new girl to be appointed Marion's ladiesmaid for the present time, until her usual girl could be called into town from where she had been sent to serve at Lincoln Greene, the Nighten country home. The bed to be aired, seating for dinner to be re-ordered, the menu re-drawn, Lady Miranda (with her regrets - though they did not sound very genuine) to be home to no further visitors for remainder of the day.

All of this was accomplished in two heartbeats. Just as quickly, the room cleared, a second tray of tea, and Sir Edward's liquor cart produced on the low table.

Finally, Lady Miranda rose from her place, almost as if her having stood in front of the staff might have given them the mistaken impression that she thought the shocking happenings of her daughter unexpectedly returned home from an ocean (a world, a war-less world) away was something to be treated as though it might be hard to manage.

She walked to where Marion still stood, half-swaying in her emotional exhaustion, and steered her youngest child into a comfy chair, the one most often frequented in memory by Marion's father.

Miranda unbuttoned Marion's jacket, without immediately removing it, and, in an action so unusual in its familiarity it was almost distressing, took a seat on the petite footstool that matched the armchair, and set at quietly removing her daughter's shoes.

Watching this unexpected ministration, Marion looked down, and thought how strange, how odd that after all these years it would prove to be her mother - a woman with whom she so rarely saw eye-to-eye - that would assist in the waking of her, in the keeping of her going and upright during what she knew would be the enduring grief of Robin's death still yet to come.

* * *

**Present - GUERNSEY -** Robin had come as quickly as he had ever done anything in his life, with only Allen along to temper his inclination toward risk (greatly increased at this present crisis) and retain any mindfulness of dangerous Nazis, and stealth, and possible capture.

Were it not still half-night, Guernsey would indeed smoke: twin pillars from its two transforming (to him) fires. The island's civic archives a shambles, they were told - the island was lousy with illicit news of it. The Barnsdale estate: the animal barn smouldering as though it had been paid a visit by Nero. The singular smell of animal death and unslaughtered - yet cooked flesh - heavily in the air.

Soon enough the wind off the sea would carry all such reminders away.

And Edward, Lord Nighten, dead.

Marion had said so - they all, everyone had heard it in her broadcast. Even the boy Djak, whose English was only aspiring toward proficient. The moment Marion's disguised voice had spoken the news, Robin had begun to make ready to leave. For how long he did not know.

He had gone first, naturally, to Barnsdale House, only to find her rooms (and any other rooms he and Allen could think of) bare of her presence.

Then, leaving a disappointed Allen behind, he had dashed to the Nightwatch windmill. Unpopulated, yet even in the relative darkness he could not miss the emptied bottles and used glasses sitting about.

He knew not where to look next. Purely out of now long-formed habit, he began to slowly circle (ever widening) outward from the windmill, not at all confident he would find anything, but needing a clue, and knowing it to be her last-known location.

He had found, of all people, Thornton, the man Eva Heindl had once assured him was a friend 'with a closed mouth', who had also (again, according to Eva) endowed Marion with his contraband radio transmission equipment that had become the basis of the Nightwatch.

They two had not exchanged much information that day, long weeks ago, when Thornton had helped Robin put Clem Nighten's un-christened boat out to sea in the shallow estuary. But the older man at least knew Robin was on friendly terms with Eva, had a vested interest in Marion, and being out at present ignoring curfew, likely had a Resistance bent of mind.

Thornton had been at attempting to gather any sort of possible fuel to start a fire. Recognizing Robin, he hurried him back to his cottage, where Marion lay.

Looking down at her, her hair, though short, still a-tumble, Robin thought of how _he_ had dealt with the pain of her leaving him in favor of a horse, in favor of a trip across the Atlantic. How he had ignored the pain of his heart, burying it, not truly finding it again until the overpowering physical pain of his injury appeared following the crash. How that bodily anguish seemed to call forth the wounding of his heart, making ignoring it any longer an impossibility.

He did not know how Marion might handle what had occurred. If it would prove to be a final straw, or further rallying cry.

He looked over to Thornton, as if asking permission for what he was about to do, and, seeing acceptance in the older man's eyes, without removing his jacket in the cottage's un-firelit coolness, he laid down on the low, crudely-hewn bed beside Marion, and waited for her to wake, and for him to see.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** Did I get your needle right, GClio? I did try. ;)  
If any reader has interest in re-reading the events leading up to Robin's 1937 proposal, you may locate them in Chapter 6 of Story 2; "_Don't Go Walkin' Down Lover's Lane_". 


	26. Dead Fathers, Good news

**GUERNSEY - Barnsdale Estate -** "Clun!" Kommandant Vaiser shouted as he stormed up the main stair of Barnsdale House before noon, demanding the estate's butler and head-of-staff make an immediate appearance.

"Clun!" he barked, "What is the meaning of this?"

Behind him his driver, known to most as Islander Dale Allen, did a clever sort of dance, making it appear as though he were struggling to keep up with his employer's hell-for-leather gait on the stair, yet all the while managing not to overtake the shorter, decidedly less-fit German.

In one of the larger parlors of the home's ground floor, a queue of Islanders was assembled, and stretched out onto the formal front grounds, wrapping about the circle gravel drive. They waited - one had nervously informed the Kommandant when he had demanded Allen pull the car up to ask - to view the recently deceased Sir Edward Nighten, lying in state at his island home.

Outraged at this answer - assembly of Islanders for any reason still forbidden, illegal, by Occupation diktat - the Kommandant had ordered more speed from the Duesenberg's accelerator, and set his own internal temperature to 'fume'.

* * *

Clun was found. Allen listened on as the himself-aged butler explained to Vaiser that the lifeless body of the elderly Sir Edward had been brought home in the early morning hours by Guernsey Constable Dunne, and as the Master (here, naturally, in speaking to Vaiser, Clun referred to Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer) had already departed the estate to return to his post on Alderney, the household staff had endeavored - with Fraulein Vaiser's help - to arrange for things as they thought best.

"You _attempt_," Vaiser growled dangerously to the very proper old fellow, "to implicate my own daughter in this _obvious_ act of insurrection?"

"My-my lord?" Clun had stammered in the wake of Vaiser's near-apoplexy, erroneously giving the Kommandant a title to which he had no claim.

"Find me the Lady Marion," Vaiser demanded of Clun. "_She_ will answer for this. Fetch Gisbonnhoffer's guards-in-residence. They will find and bring this Island Constable to answer for his role instigating this act of reckless disobedience."

Allen knew better than to protest to the Kommandant that it was only preamble to a decent Christian burial, after all - not an organized act of premeditated Resistance - the funeral of Guernsey's most-celebrated part-time citizen. And for a believed Nazi-collaborator, at that, become so with the published recant of his infamous monograph. A man whose house held at present more German guests than once-free Islander occupants, and a full staff to serve these now-exalted overlords.

Doubtless more than one German stationed on the island would wish to attend and pay their respects upon Lord Nighten's passing, though it was more likely any such Germans in attendance would be more intimately on terms with Nighten's daughter, or future son-in-law.

But Allen knew better than to speak up so. And was to find himself shortly enough dispatched, thankfully dismissed to where such decent, knee-jerk responses no longer were to need swallowing down.

Locating the door to it, Vaiser burst into what had priorly been Lady Nighten's suite of rooms, looking for his daughter, who was not to be found there. The Kommandant removed his great coat, not waiting for staff to appear to take it from him, and arranged himself in the largest, coziest of chairs in the chic sitting room, with the same gusto and mine-by-rights attitude as he might have in setting up an impromptu field office on yet another front.

"You. Driver," he beckoned to Allen, though they two were now alone, Clun off on the tasks to which he had been relegated. "Find Fraulein Vaiser. Bring her to me at once. And Driver," he continued, his voice turning saccharine in its mock-instructiveness, "if you were to...explain to her that...whole-hearted remorse in this instance might go far to rescue her bony-excuse-for-an-arse?" A smile. A crinkle of his nose as he shook his head. "It would not go amiss."

* * *

**Mr. Thornton's Cottage -** Marion sensed someone breathing nearby, the sound louder than her own, still half-sleeping exhales. She felt herself coming into a moment that never was, like alighting from a passing cloud onto a distant mountaintop. The breathing was not Eva's (sounds from the trundle mattress in her Barnsdale bedchamber would not be so distinct, the warmth along Marion's back so immediate).

Her mind was enveloped in the fantasy that she was lady mistress of Kirk Leaves, surrounded by Robin's - her and Robin's - rooms, there. Rooms she had always demurred away from visiting (despite frequent invitations varying in their levels of sincerety and randiness), rooms unknown to her, but much-dreamed about, much-speculated upon at the time. Like finally seeing behind a curtain which for so long had opaguely obscured what was beyond, behind the veil.

Her nightgown the softest lilac satin, the covers over them - yes, _them_ - the plumpest to be found. She looked to Robin, the parts of him she could see. The hands and forearms of a man, the nude shoulder of same. _Her lover_. The man in her bed. Or rather, the man in whose bed _she_ was in. The bed which they obviously shared. The pleasures within it which they also in the dream, quite obviously, shared.

The war far away, or even, never-had-been. A Sunday morning, before she had to be up, to meet with Wadlowe and the housekeeper and arrange for the day to come. A Sunday morning to simply lie abed and marvel. That the world could feel so perfect, so simple, fitted into Robin's arms. Fitted into this perfection of privacy. A jigsaw puzzle so long thought to be forever missing a piece, now found. Now complete. Puzzle done, time for rest. To enjoy the scene assembled. All that was required of her: to lay, safe within his arms.

She recalled nothing of how she came to be here, nothing of weddings or honeymoon trips, trousseaus or vows. She should have been alarmed about her lack of curiosity over where her wedding ring might be found - she felt none on her finger. Yet, she did not. In that far-longer-than-it-truly-was moment as her mind set into waking, there was nothing to worry for, nothing over which to fret. The world was again in its right mind, idyllicly so. To question such harmony the idiot prerogrative of none but a fool.

Turning her head back toward him Marion announced with some surprise (but without irritation), "you're drunk," upon encountering the pungent smell of liquor seeping from breath and pores.

Robin's eyes opened at this, and widened at her accusation, recalling her to herself. The crinkles about their edges held none of his usual gaiety.

"No," she recanted with dismay, "_I_ am drunk." Her hand went to her temple, "Quite so, and of a morning." There was a small degree of wonder in her tone. She was only beginning to grasp that she was not, in point of fact, ensconced at Kirk Leaves.

His brow furrowed at her obviously scattered perception. "I came before the broadcast had finished," he told her.

Her cloudy mind offered her small pieces of the night before. "...and I passed out, likewise."

"So Mr. Thornton has said," Robin agreed. "He found you there, a record repeating in a scratched groove some thirty minutes beyond your usual sign-off time."

"So very long? That cannot be good," she said half-heartedly, taking in Mr. Thornton's very modest cottage interior around them. She sat herself gingerly up, and Robin followed her lead. The crude, low bed creaked beneath this re-distribution of weight, but there was little else to sit upon in the cottage, save a single chair by the fire, and Mr. Thornton's own plain bed.

"I have left Barnsdale," she told him, intending the announcement in a more permanent way than the obvious fact she was not there at present. She tried to drag a hand through her hair, but its tangles were too great. Her hand would not agree to move through it.

Robin took his hand and ran it from her shoulder down her arm where he took her hand in his and clenched it. "And where is Sir Edward?" Robin asked, with tender hesitance, inquiring after the body.

"_Mitch_ is dead," she answered him, her tongue and teeth nipping at her lips in her uncertainty of delivering the news. "Geis had him killed, or killed him - " she shook her head and looked down, "to spite me. Shall we talk about that?" she asked, with faux brightness.

Her head snapped around, almost defiantly. "About my punishment for precipitating it? About how I think it feels to have good, dear, steady Mitch's blood on my very hands?"

Robin let himself have a moment to breathe through that deeply upsetting piece of news and re-focussed. "Last night," he prompted her. "_Will_ you tell me?"

Her chin shot up in a gesture of semi-defiance he was not unfamiliar with. The half-coming-on, half held-back tears as she spoke, less familiar. "Sir Edward, Lord Nighten lies dead on the ground at his holiday estate. A rather ignominious end, wouldn't you say?"

"And Gisbonnhoffer killed him? Also to spite you?"

She shook her head, though she would ever lay the sin of her father's dead at Geis' over-filled doorstep. Even so, such was not the full truth of it. "He died trying to save me from the blazing barn." She shrugged as if to explain. "He thought me to be inside. Gisbonnhoffer set torches to the animal barn because he has come to believe that I have kept a - a marriage - from him. I do not know why, but he believes himself both betrayed and greviously ill-used by me."

Robin's concern turned to simliar confusion. "The Lieutenant thinks you married?"

She nodded. "He threatened to interrogate Father on the matter, but I could not let him - what if he had spoken of you, here on the islands? So I entered a full confession: I am married, my indignation and outrage over his own attempt at bigamy merely a sham to conceal my own, black plans to falsely wed him."

Robin returned to his original question. "And Sir Edward?"

She half-attempted a smile. "Beyond where they may touch him. Asleep. Happy."

"Happy?"

"He came back to me," she told him, taking his other hand in hers as she related what now seemed miraculous. "He _knew_. He was - more lucid than I had seen him since just before the Occupation. He spoke of Mother, of Clem, of our lives here...of you."

"Me?" He squeezed her hand.

"That he was glad that I would still have you, here."

She let him pull her into an embrace, his arms circled about her.

He placed a fervent kiss into the crown of her hair. No spoken condolences, no apologies or trite attempts at wisdom. "Marry me," he said, without elaborating.

She immediately withdrew from the intimacy of his arms (no matter how good it had felt) and turned to stare at his mouth, as though she had only imagined it spoke.

Admittedly, he felt a shade less confidant in his suggestion with her removed from his near proximity. "Marion," he appealed to her. "We are ever and always going in different directions. I no longer have the patience to assume that we will meet again on the _other_ side of the world. These last years have taught me - as I ought to have known all along - that I must snatch at happiness when I can. And you - have _long_ been my happiness."

As was so often her way, she stormed in response to his proposal, to the hopefulness it held. "The world is on fire all around us, Robin." She, of course, knew she had no need to tell him that. "Tomorrow is far from a promise - if even an expectation. And you ask me to troth with you 'forever'?" She scoffed. "It is too absurd!" She knew she cried against it so because of how very tempting an offer it was this day, this moment. "We may neither of us live to see luncheon."

"No," Robin came at it in an unusually (for him) reasoned way. "I ask only what the minister, what God, will - till death do us part. _Is_ that so unreasonable?" His hand reached out for her face. "If death comes tomorrow, or this afternoon, or thirty years hence, I am yours." And then he capped it off with her own, long ago desire. "Lay down with me, Marion, and never get up."

What a vapor that would have sent her into those years ago. Lay, with Robin, never having to get up. Never having to think of leaving, of parting. An offer of always. What tingles, what unknown, hidden raptures, what only-ever half-imagined marital delights might just such a request have conjured to her?

She found that silly, untested young girl, with her incomplete understanding of what the world held for her made her angry. Just as did that girl's inexperienced thoughts of lovemaking, of considering the possibility that a woman might actually contract with a man 'forever', and truly mean (and hope in) it.

"You do not understand, Robin." She scoffed with bitter laughter. "How can you NOT understand? Have you not seen suffering? Are you simply blind to what takes place all about us? Every day? I know you are not, and yet - to ask this?" She felt herself bristling. "What have I to offer _you_, to offer anyone?"

Could he, he of all people, know her so very little now?

"My mind cannot even _see_ tomorrows. My insides are half-burnt, singed and grey. What sort of bride would _that_ make? I would be no gift for you. I could make no home for you. What do we even have, here? No home, no land, no...true professions. I would say we live in a fantasy, but it is more a night terror, with night never set to end. Nothing here is real - or perhaps it IS real, it is the only true permanence anymore."

Oh, she was so angry. And she was so hurt, and so - grieving. And so, so very exhausted. She should not have to explain these things to him. She should not have to - Not have to - _Re-convince_ herself of them.

"And you speak of snatching at happiness? Grabbing for brass bloody rings when the carousel no longer dependably travels, even, in a circle? What can a wife be - a husband be - in such a place, such a time?"

For some reason, at the last moment she attempted to soften her tirade, alter the tenor of their conversation. "'Tis a bad attempt at gallows humor, I do not doubt."

Robin had taken in everything she said. He watched, also, what the saying of it had brought onto her physically. "Were you going to go through with it?" he asked, his tone soft, non-confrontational, "to marry _him_?"

Her mind bogged down with the unexpected question for a moment. Her eyes scrambled. "Yes," she answered truthfully, her voice dying away in the admitting of it. "As I have said."

He let himself give an incremental smile at her answer, let his hand slide from where it had come to rest on her shoulder up the side of her neck, cupping the side of her face. He let his opposite shoulder shrug. "Then how can you not better accept me?" His eyes beseeched. "Do you not love me, Marion? Did you not once? And now, again?"

All breath exhaled her body. Her shoulders dropped. She would not lie, nor prevaricate. "May God watch over you, Robin, I love you. Once, far more than I knew. And now," it was barely a whisper, "with as much as I have left to do so." She pushed her jaw against his palm.

"And Gisbonnhoffer already believes you married," he went on. "You can fear nothing from him, then, on that account."

"Oh, I can fear a great many things of him," she began in what she hoped would continue on as a sensible tone. "He burnt the barn," her words began, already, to become shaky, "killed Dovecote while I was made to watch," there was nothing now but to get through it, "and incinerated Gypsum and the others without batting an eye." Her tears now wet his hand. "I can only assume this is but the beginning of his cruelty."

Her voice caught as she found herself asking, like a child in fear of a bogeyman, "please, Robin," her eyes closed with the effort. "Don't let him touch me - don't let those hands that - _Don't_!" For a moment she found it very difficult to leave off shaking her head.

"'Don't let him' - " Robin stalled out, and half-asked the question in wonderment, "do you mean to say..."

The implication momentarily snapped her back into herself. "_No!_" she protested his assumption, "I have never let him, that is, we have never...shared a bed."

They sat for a moment looking at one another. She saw the way his eyes regarded her, so much more deeply, with such greater comprehension and empathy than had those of the prankster's, the merry half-man half-boy's of her first proposal. How she had loved that half-boy. But how, how very much she had tried not to, but yet nonetheless had grown to need that man.

"Robin," she asked.

"Yes?" Always, ever with a ready answer for her.

"Marry me." She tried to not shudder, tried not to bodily react to making such a wild, impossible suggestion. "Share my bed. Take back our lost yesterday. Convince me of tomorrow."

He did not say yes, in any spoken language.

She offered him no nursery rhyme or grand romantic gesture. There was no giving and receiving of a ring. (The ring once - and always - symbolizing their joining an ocean away.) The exceptionally modest fire on Mr. Thornton's hearth was nearly going out. Within the un-electrified cottage, the day's light barely illuminating their surroundings, it could just as likely have been 1200 AD as 1943 AD. And Robin answered her in a similar, timeless way.

His second hand came up to bookend the other cheek of her face, the tips of his fingers teasing into her hair, and he brought her mouth toward his and kissed her until, if not for the imminent possibility of Mr. Thornton's return to his own cottage, doubtless his acceptance of her proposal would have gone much further. And in that moment, doubtless, she would have let it.

"I can see the society page clipping even now," he took a moment to brag. "'Lady NoOne to wed the Viscount of Nothing in a bare-bones ceremony held at an unknown locale. No family to attend'." At this realization, he stopped joking, and his eyes flicked away.

"Let us take today," his thumb brushed along her cheek under her eye, though no further tears were shed there, "for your Father. Allen is with me. I shall get myself shortly to Barnsdale to see what is afoot there. Eat what Mr. Thornton provides, rest and heal. _I_ shall see you at the Nightwatch. And ferry you, then, to meet my 'family'. As for the service to come, I have _just_ the man for it." He smiled at her, but not without a certain sadness, uncharacteristic for him to let show through.

She faced it head-on. "And yet you have no Mitch to stand up with you."

He could not afford to let himself descend into full-on despair for his lost friend. As always, with the unit and with his work, there was too much at risk to lose focus for long. "And so _I_ shall take the day," he promised her, "the month, the year ahead, to mourn Mitch."

"But your love of, and grief for him - it does not diminish your wish to...have this wedding?"

He allowed himself a deep sigh. "Sadness," he thought of his own mother's death, "does not preclude the possibility of joy. Your father. Mitch. We two shall be sad together. But we shall be - "

She finished it for him. "_Together_."

"Aye. But a few hours more, and then, my love, '_High diddle doubt, my candle's out/My little maid is not at home/Saddle my hog, and bridle my dog/And I shall fetch my little maid home_.'"

And his little maid kissed him farewell until then.

* * *

**Barnsdale Estate -** Allen made quick work of getting down to the main floor level of the house via the now-familiar servants' stair. He knew if he found he needed to he could rely on someone in the lower-level kitchens knowing where Eleri might be, but thought to try his own instincts first.

When he came to the large parlor's servants' entrance, he pushed on the immaculately oiled door and it slit open silently, and just far enough that he was able to survey the room within without himself being seen.

The Kommandant's unexpected arrival had not yet dampened the attendance of mourners, it would seem. There was little enough to fear at present, until the Kommandant could assemble an attachment of troops to force (or threaten) them into dispersing, which would take time, as the house's telephone - despite its being located in what was now largely accepted as Nazi Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer's home - was no longer in service, its line severed, as were most on the island, in the first days of Occupation.

Sir Edward was indeed laid out in full pomp, his body dressed by the staff in his best (or near-best, to Allen's eye) clothing, laid out on sturdy planks (_Blimey_, how valuable that wood was to Islanders burning anything at present for fuel!) across two high-backed chairs.

Candles, long wax tapers the likes of which Islanders had not seen in a year and six months or more, burned (needlessly - it was full daylight) in beautiful, ornate candle stands, and fall flowers (of which the island, still, somehow, managed to be right swollen) adorned the room with the proper amount of tasteful decoration.

And Elerinne Vaiser stood at the head of the corpse - neither family, nor truly acquainted with the man - graciously accepting condolences from any and all comers in a sedate navy blue frock that had clearly been located within Marion's closet.

He took a quiet step into the room, not wishing to disturb its reverent atmosphere, and positioned himself behind Eleri's shoulder.

He extended his hand toward her shoulder, and in response to weight upon it, she turned to him, her thin eyebrows coming together in an unspoken question at his appearance. Clearly, she had neither noticed, nor been informed of, her father's arrival.

"Best come with me, straightaway," he told her, keeping his voice low. Sliding his hand from her shoulder down to the small of her back, he used it to steer her toward and then through the servants' stair door.

"First things first," he asked, once the door swung silently shut. "Where's Lady Marion?"

"Well, I don't know that."

"Your father means to find out - and not nicely."

"If he can, he's a far better detective than any of us here."

"You don't see, Ellie," he attempted to counsel her. "He doesn't have to be a better - or even a good - detective. Get enough soldiers out here and he finds her by sheer force of numbers. And it's best if we find her first. He's keen to see heads roll over this," he cocked his head to indicate the other side of the door, "assemblage."

"I am not lying," she told him. "_I_ do not know where she is. I can only hope - " and then he watched in surprise as she began to softly half-cry, her slender shoulders shaking with unheard sobs before him.

"There, there. Wot's this, then? Closer to old Edward than I had thought you were, Love?" He managed to stop himself short of asking if she had, perhaps ever gone in search of a fictional missing scarf in Lord Nighten's chambers.

He inclined his head slightly to the side, as if to better examine her weeping face, trying to puzzle out if this emotion, was, indeed, genuine.

"Well," she sniffled, "he was a kind man - even if he was...dotty. And Lady Marion loved him, didn't she? Oh, I pray to God, Mr. Allen, that she is alive."

"Dale," he, as ever, prompted her toward the familiar version of his alias. "Alive?"

"That he has not killed her as well."

"'He' who? 'As well'?" Allen could not become too fraught at present over the immediate status of Marion, having, with Robin, heard that she made it to the Nightwatch broadcast.

"Herr Geis," she said, and a shiver took her. "He came, in the night. I saw him with Sir Edward. He - I was wrong. _Wrong_. He has no kindness in his heart. No 'qualities'. They had barricaded me in my rooms, but from my window I saw Sir Edward had gotten free, had rushed off toward the animal barn, which was burning - where the Lieutenant had taken Lady Marion, and several of his men. When Sir Edward met with Herr Geis - entreating him for his help, I do not doubt - Herr Geis simply...thrust Sir Edward from him and walked away, never looking back. Constable Dunne returned a short time later with Sir Edward's body. He told us that Sir Edward believed Lady Marion was in the burning barn, and rushed in to help her, to get her out. And in doing this, he met his end."

As she had given her story, Allen had watched her intently, at once trying to process both the facts as she presented them, and her own reaction to them.

As she was still somewhat crying, he reached out his arms toward her, and she agreed to step into them. "Here," he said, attempting to comfort the girl, "here."

But he could not let the need for comfort in that moment overshadow his need to know where Marion was, and the tricky task of producing a contrite Eleri for her father upstairs.

"And no one here has seen Lady Marion since then?"

"Constable Dunne says she has run off. Some of the staff expect her to return, others - a minority - believe she may have...done herself a mortal harm."

Well, that _was_ a grim thought to consider.

"Your father will order the viewing disbanded, you know."

"And why should he?" she half-cried out, her ire raised. "For all I - or anyone - cares, he may sit in and oversee it if he likes."

"Look, Hen," Allen attempted to explain to her, "Your dad's an important guy 'round here. Mind yourself of that. Important men don't like to show up and find unexpected, bordering-on-illegal things going on. Apologize to him. Tell him you were wrong. Maybe _request_ that he oversee the viewing. Let him know you were only doing it to keep the staff and nearby village folk from mutiny. Trying to be the lady of the house when the lady - and her future lord - are missing. It was a mistake. That's all. Sorry, Dad. Kiss kiss."

"But I'm not sorry." She actually stamped her foot in defiance. "And I'm not wrong. It is he who is wrong, and ought to be sorry." She cocked one ear as though she had heard him wrongly. "Are you suggesting that I live my life counter to what I know to be truth?" She gave an exasperated exhale. "What sort of a person would do that?"

"What sort of a person, indeed," he mumbled to himself, following her brief diatribe against his advice.

"In conclusion," he added, hoping something of what he said would perhaps manage to help her bridle her tongue in her impending interview with her father, "we must let the Kommandant decide in what way it is best to lay Sir Edward to rest - unless, not bein' funny, we wish to join 'im."

"I think you must be the single, least-courageous man I've ever met," she told him in wonder as he followed close behind her up the servants' stair.

"Yeah," he half-scoffed, recalling to himself not to fall too far below her on the steep stair, lest he be tempted to sight (it would prove so easy) up her frock's skirt, "but in ten-year's time let's see, Miss Ellie. Let's see who of us 's still among the livin'."

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** Sorry updates have been coming less reliably often. I stepped out on a brief fic-cation with BBC RH series Allan. I'm sure you'll be seeing some of that 'trip' posted here in days to come...but try not to throw rotten fruit because he took me (briefly) away from the Channel Islands, and back to Sherwood... 


	27. Bad Fathers, Surprising News

**Mr. Thornton's Cottage -** Robin thought it best to first find Mr. Thornton before he left Marion to see what was afoot at Barnsdale.

Dependably, the older man was not far from the cottage and his newly taken-on charge, there. He was just at exiting a small lean-to of an outbuilding, something of a primitive workshop it appeared, several large - what Robin thought at first were slender logs - within his arms. As the two men drew closer to one another, the items revealed themselves to be rolled papers. Paper - or combustibles of any kind - being at present quite scarce on the islands, they attracted Robin's eye for both their make-up and their remarkably large size.

Mr. Thornton shrugged. "They are what I have left, and I _must_ keep a fire now. It was one thing in the past to go without, an old man, alone. But now - Lady Marion is not accustomed to such dire straits as we are sure to find ahead." His face took on a look of resignation. "I do regret destroying them, though. They were such a pride of my father's. And such a fascination for me as a child."

"What are they, then? Sketches?" Robin queried, thinking them amateur attempts at landscapes, or still-lifes.

Thornton gave a slight shrug. "Schematics, of a kind. My family is from Cornwall, in my father's time. When the call went out in '34 for British miners, my father emigrated, found himself an islander wife, and when the Company gave up and closed the mines, he chose to stay on. I was born here," his eyes took in their immediate surroundings with warm nostalgia. "The youngest of twelve."

Robin did not intend rudeness, but eagerly interrupted the gentleman's reverie. "Do you mean to say, that what you have, here - "

"Technical specifications and maps for the disbanded Sark Mining Company," Thornton replied. "As a child and young boy I learnt them like the back of my hand. The family had not much in the way of reading material, and mining was still, after all that time, my father's one true passion. He had lived for mining, like it was something deep within his blood. And indeed such work _had_ been done by his family for generations. Poring over these, studying these...for him it was the closest he could come to his loved-but-lost profession."

Robin laughed. "So you stand here, not only able to produce exquisite documentation," he had begun to be able to see the painstakingly-rendered schematics, "on Little Sark's mines, but able to tell me that you, _yourself_, could also act as knowledgeable interpreter of them?"

"Sir," Thornton's tone was that of a head-scratch, "I do not see what good such papers dedicated to a long-abandoned silver and copper colliery might do for you. 'Twas closed nearly one hundred year ago."

With a grin, Robin assured him, "Friend, most-excellent Thornton, if you will but find another way to feed your fire for the day, I shall send a man to you tomorrow with coal in payment for both your papers, and your assistance in deciphering them."

"Coal?" Thornton near-gasped at the name of the valuable fuel. "None but the Germans now have coal."

"_Hm_. So it is said," Robin agreed, full-on twinkle in his eye as he patted the man on his back, "and none but _you_ have what _I_ need."

* * *

**Barnsdale Estate -** They could not immediately locate the Kommandant within the house. He was no longer to be found where Allen had left him, in Eleri's suite of rooms. Following the sound of voices from there led them to the men's hallway, past the bedroom used by Gisbonnhoffer when he was in residence, and toward what had, until early this morning, been the master suite - occupied by Lord Nighten himself.

Just outside the closed door to Sir Edward's once-beloved sunroom, Allen grabbed for Eleri's arm, spun her back toward him, and pulled her into a narrow, out-of-the-way space. He quickly established that no one else was about - save the voices in the room beyond, and, knowing better than to do what he was about to do, sank his lips onto hers, knowing the stolen kiss would quick enough wash away the confusion playing across her face in that moment before he took his job (and quite possibly his life and manhood - if the Kommandant were in the right mood) into his own hands.

He kissed her, literally, with one eye open, at the watch. It made the encounter, for him, less than whole, though he doubted _she_ was likely to notice any lack.

As he had assumed, Eleri offered no opposition - until the time came to pull away. That, she did not care for.

"There," he told her with a curt nod, wanting to shake her by the shoulders so that she might open her eyes instead of standing there, dreamily half-swaying before him. "And you shall have another if you play at the good girl inside, as we discussed," he promised her.

Her eyes opened, but only for the length of time it took her to ask, "may I have another, just now?" she bargained, "Quite quickly?" She closed her eyes again, in anticipation.

Nothing happened.

She opened her mouth to suggest, "If you like, we could go back to the servants' stair..."

Again, Allen took her by the upper arm, and this time counter-spun her, eyes still closed, back toward the sunroom doorway. He reached out to give her bum a 'speed-it-up' swat as if to help her along her way.

The surprising impact of that opened her eyes and called her back to the moment at hand, and it was with a decidedly cross look back at him that she turned the knob to present herself to her father.

* * *

Vaiser regally lounged in one of the room's excellent chairs while a man - Eleri recalled him as the Island of Guernsey's Kommandant - stood and held discussion with him.

"I tell you Vaiser," the other Kommandant was saying, "let this formal viewing go on. It takes the stuffing out of this underground account that we are somehow at fault in his death. To anyone with eyes, he has passed away from old age. You are present, here, after all. This is Gisbonnhoffer's house. Nighten was championed by the Reich following his recant. There can be little harm in it. Stay the day. Tomorrow will see him buried, a footnote to a footnote of history."

Their interaction seemed strange to Eleri. The Guernsey Kommandant and her father should have been equals, of a kind, neither telling the other what to do nor how to do it, especially on their own island command. Yet here, her father - some distance from his island command - appeared (by being seated, by at present possessing - ruling - this grand estate solely through his attendance at it) to far and away have the upper hand.

Perhaps her mother had been right when she had passed along Baron von Bachmeier's news - that the SS was now become more powerful than the regular military, that they had gained an influential upper hand through their cutthroat tactics, and those tactics' success, in the war. Of course, as wife to an SS officer, her mother had shared this with a large degree of pride. As her husband advanced in power, so then did she.

But for Eleri to see her stranger-of-a-father, Vaiser, sitting here, basking in such an ability to make other powerful men dance like marionettes about him - _pride_ was hardly the emotion Eleri felt.

But then, neither was fear.

* * *

"I have ordered the Constable punished." Vaiser announced it as though he were reciting what he had requested be on the dinner menu.

"Gravely so?" the Guernsey Kommandant inquired.

"Yes. You disagree?" and there was a dangerousness to the question.

"His name?"

"Dunne. A local, I am told. Doubtless had some sort of...emotional attachment to the family. Felt he was doing a kindness by not leaving well-enough alone. Also, responsible for the loss of the girl."

"Lady Marion? She is missing?"

"So it would seem," Vaiser answered dryly.

"And do you seek to find her for her own good - or is she also to be in some trouble?"

"_Initialllllly_," Vaiser strung the word out as though he were only just developing his thoughts on the subject, "I should say, for her own good. She is the last link to the British aristocracy we have left under our control here. The official position is that she - and the memory of her sorry excuse for a father - are too valuable as propaganda tools at present." He paused. "Also, there seems to be something amiss between her and my lieutenant. When she is found we will sort it out. But no, I do not see her being granted a return to living here - unless marriage to my unfortunately smitten Lieutenant comes about."

The Guernsey Kommandant flicked an eyebrow. "And you are less than keen on that idea?"

"Well, there's a reason we haven't all shipped our families here direct, yes? Women make war...messy, conflicted, and unpleasant. Oh," Vaiser caught sight of Eleri. "Hello, Messy. Conflicted. _Un_pleasant. Do come in."

With a steeply arched brow at her arrival, the Guernsey Kommandant dismissed himself (though a man of his station was more usually the one to do the dismissing) to return to St. Peter Port, confident that events at the Barnsdale Estate were well in hand by Kommandant Vaiser. And even more confident that he wished very certainly to avoid crossing that man at any cost.

* * *

"How can you speak of people that way? As little better than beasts?"

"Beasts?" Vaiser asked (he did not rise), as though the notion floated about in the air between them, somewhere not quite above their heads. "You, little girl, speak to _me_ of beasts? Well, I am sure you now _do_ know whereof you speak. Your little in-_fat_-u-a-tion with the Beast, the monster cabaret act - the fiendish 'psychic' - has not gone unnoticed by _everyone_. You are the laughingstock of Prinzer's private table, no doubt. I would _say_ I am impressed by your ability to finally at least sort out desiring the correct _nationality_ of your prospective paramours. The proper ethnicity. And pre-War I would have applauded what keen social climbing sense you have clearly inherited from your mother. A Count! And a von Himmel, at that! But now I am informed - far more often than could _ever_ please me - how you consistently turn down fine German officers asking for dances. For going out walking. Even - refusing to accept them buying you drinks while you sit - slavering over that half-wit half-man daemon in the dark, your - your - _girl bits_ no doubt tingling for the unnatural touch of his _fingerless_ hands in ways you only begin to understand. And I am to be taken to task as a beast?"

She radiated defiance, her rejoinder like a rock thrown through glass. Once tossed, the thrower fleeing. "You speak so against him because he frightens you."

"Frightens? Me? _Yes_." He performed a stagy shiver. "I daresay he would, if met with in a dark alley."

She went on as though he had not answered her, her voice decrying her father's slighting of Joss Tyr. "His connection with the world beyond is a powerful one - that you do not understand. _None_ of you understand him!" Her hands had turned into fists at her side. "I have heard the four prophecies he gave to you that day." She searched Vaiser's face to see if he would give away any flicker of cowardice.

She boasted. "I have memorized them, and I know that they are coming true." Eleri held up her hand to illustrate each one, beginning by raising her thumb. "With my arrival, you became a father. Two: you have an enemy without a country, without a family, without, even, a spouse. Three: the Watchman. The Watchman will rise - doubled." Her voice turned into less of a cry, more of an accusation. "I have heard that your pursuit of the woman islander illegally broadcasting did not work. That you thought her dead, and yet she airs the Nightwatch again - and I know that following those killings another Watchman, a _Whichman_, has risen. To see justice done. To punish..." She gulped a hurried breath. "And _four_ - "

With a thud, Vaiser stood, and curtly cut her off in her listing. "Hear me now," he half-shrieked, his voice sloping into an unnatural tenor range, and he stomped toward her, at one point pushing a narrow side table over in his anger at its impeding him.

A crystal decanter and its matching glasses shattered against the floor as the sliver tray they had occupied clattered against the now sherry-dampened parquet.

"If you continue to prove so eager to find a man - or half-man - to pop the cork on your sodden..." he made use of an almost unspeakable German word for her anatomy, now bringing his face menacingly close to hers, "you little wish-to-be-slut," his voice dropped to a whisper. "Rest assured that it is _I_ who will do the choosing. I have already learned from Herr Geis' Landser Thered that after last night he has most _specific_ knowledge of where you sleep."

The recoiling horror at his petrifyingly-rendered threat rolled off Eleri in nearly visible waves.

"Unless you would like _me_ to draft men to _fill_...your dance card - you are of no worth to your mother and I _second-hand_, you know...unless we should suddenly fancy running a brothel - you will keep said dance card quite blank, agreeing to only the most modest advances of any appropriate German soldier insofar as...to. Be. Polite. As any convent-raised female ought." He let his teeth part in a gesture that would have been a smile, had his eyes not remained coldly stone, emotionless.

"About the viewing - " Eleri managed to choke out, her sudden contrition forced into being by true fear, and far too late.

"Sod the 'viewing'," he told her smoothly, returning to his chair, his point made. "We are well-past our disagreement over that." He waved his hand as though it mattered little. "It will continue, and I will remain overnight in the house to ensure that all is done properly, and depart after the old bag-of-bones is interred."

Knowing she was dismissed at his obvious motions to return downstairs and again take up her position beside the body, she turned and left the room. Left Sir Edward's apartments. But there was no one (as she had thought there might be) waiting for her on the other side of the door. Indeed, no sign of Mr. Allen anywhere, and when her mind first told her to run for the brief safety of her own rooms here, she found in fear that she could not. As though what her father had said - had threatened - had sullied them for her. Turned them from a place of delight into a place of potential horror.

She fled instead to Lady Marion's rooms (the staff having reliably repaired their disarray from the night before), and found herself at the front of the armoire. She flung the wooden doors open, with no thought to the mirror glass hung within them, and buried her face into the clothing within, mixing her tears with another woman's relinquished possessions.

* * *

**Nightwatch Windmill -** Though the song she was playing was not the one that had been circling about in Robin's head all day, _that_ was the Glenn Miller Orchestra's 'Serenade in Blue' (there was no way for Marion to have acquired any records since the Occupation that were not German, or possibly French), he could nonetheless hear the lyric as clearly as though it _had_ been.

Just as though he were listening to the wireless his last furlough in London before the unit's disastrously concluded mission to France.

"_When I hear that 'Serenade in Blue'/I'm somewhere in another world, alone with you/Sharing all the joys we used to know, many moons ago/It seems like only yesterday, the small cafe, a crowded floor/And as we danced the night away, I hear you say forevermore/And then the song became a sigh, Forevermore became goodbye...But tell me darling, is there still a spark?/Or only lonely ashes of the flame we knew?_"

Yes, he must remember to share that song with her later.

"The Nightwatch regrets to report that Guernsey Constable Dunne was executed today for the aid he offered during last night's fire at the Barnsdale Estate."

Robin listened from where he sat as Marion went on to list other bits of local news that he had found for her over the course of the day, her own ability to research such hampered by the fact Mr. Thornton kept no wireless at his home - not even a primitive crystal set - and she had traveled nowhere and spoken to none but Thornton and himself since the fire.

Robin had managed, with the help of Allen, to secure a change of clothes for her from among her room at Barnsdale. As the Kommandant had chosen to stay the night at the estate, so would his Driver. And so there might be another small bit of smuggled goods to look forward to tomorrow, primarily some foods that might be stored (as some were here at the Nightwatch) in one of Mr. Thornton's cellars.

But the underground news of the day (though not all of it entirely fresh, or even current) had also carried with it dismaying information for Robin, information he knew he was unlikely to get through the broadcast without bringing up to the woman he loved. The woman who had only today again promised to marry him.

He knew himself too well. "I have been thinking," he spoke out during a song. "Perhaps if you were to announce that you were ceasing to broadcast? If you made it known that you were stepping down of your own free choice. Perhaps _then_ the Jerries would accept it, chose not to pursue taking further lives. Certainly there would be no need to."

Marion's brow appreciably furrowed. She made no attempt to hide her mounting incredulity at his unexpected suggestion. "Yes. No need. Because they would have then won. What are you on about?" She studied his face and posture closely for a moment. "You've had news," she accused him. "You've heard about Louisa Gould."

At her so easily sussing out the root of his worry, his eyes widened in challenge. "And why should I _not_ have heard about her, may I ask? Were you deliberately keeping it from me? A Jerseywoman, informed on and arrested for having a wireless - sheltering a Russian prisoner? Why has _her_ story not been reported on your Nightwatch?"

Marion's mouth fell into a line. "Because too many people are too scared already. What would sharing her story here do, but possibly discourage others from taking similar risks?"

He scoffed at her logic. "Exactly what it's _supposed_ to do!"

She let her mouth fall open, aping disbelief at his chosen stance. "I do not discourage _you_ from taking risks. Am I to see this simply as a case of Oxley cold feet?"

"You sit there and call me coward, Woman? When have I ever shown you fear?"

"Only once," she told him levelly. "No, twice. Once, at the Needle. You said you were afraid. The day you proposed. Frightened by happiness. Afraid of what you might do were it taken from you. And, I think," and this was skating damnably close to the edge for her - skating onto ice too thin to trust would hold her up so close to the happiness of his re-accepted proposal. "When I told you I was going to America." Her eyes narrowed. "I did not take it for fear, then. But now I find I might do well to re-examine it."

She had to lift the needle then, and lay it onto another record after announcing it, so there was no safe silence for Robin to speak any reply into.

Instead, he rose and walked toward her, taking her left hand in his and caressing the ring finger where it might wear a husband's token. Then he kissed it, and as he raised his head, she saw in his repentant eyes (as she dropped the needle with her free right hand) that he would not again raise the question of Louisa Gould, or of terminating the Nightwatch, anytime soon.

Once the safety of the record going out over the airwaves began, she turned her thoughts to those of the imminent bride. "Who will you have to stand up with you, then?" Neither of them had re-spoken Mitch's name that day. "Carter? Is he not nearest in rank, and so appropriate to the task?"

Robin looked at her as though she understood him not at all. "No, I shall not have Carter."

His refusal only half-way surprised her. "Then _I_ shall."

Robin was agog. "Marion, you make it sound as though we are choosing seconds in a duel!"

She made certain to smile as she asked, "And who did you think I might pick?"

He shook his head. "I did not know. I thought, perhaps, we might ask Abby Rufford, a neighboring widow, to partner and stand witness for you."

Now it was Marion's turn to display shock. "And bring more notoriety to the event? _Strangers_ present?"

Robin shrugged. "Or Wills."

"I don't _know_ Wills."

"Well, you ought to. That is, you might. He's good people, Marion. Kind. Right-minded." Robin thought to offer a small joke at Wills' middle class upbringing, "Though not, strictly, your mother's sort."

"If he is so wonderful, then you ought have Wills. _I_ shall have Carter."

Robin gave an exhale like a blow to a heavy bag. "He's next-door to a barbarian!"

She found she could not help but let her mouth cock into a sort-of smile at the thought. "Then you must, in politeness, not appear shocked when he picks nits off me during the ceremony."

But Robin's complaint was not so easily brushed aside. "He kidnapped you!"

She nodded. "And so we share a unique relationship."

He shook his head in aggravation. "Very well, you are so stubborn. _I_ shall have Djak."

"The Gypsy boy?"

"Well I cannot single out one of the unit - just one - can I? Allen will be at Barnsdale with the Kommandant for the night. Johnson and Royston I must have preparing to rendezvous back here with Mr. Thornton for the plans to the mines. No, I shall have Djak. Perhaps his pet pigeon may act as flower girl, altar boy. Something."

"So we are bound at the broadcast's conclusion for La Salle's farm?"

Robin nodded. "But hush, sweet lady," he told her, his face coming intimately close to hers, "speak quietly, so that only I may hear. For there are spies everywhere I am told." His breath tickled the hair about her ears, and danced on her skin there, until he removed his mouth from its joking and set it instead to the task of seeing that she was well kissed until the song had finished.

**...TBC...**


	28. A Certain Kind of Magic

**SARK - Farm of Blind La Salle -** Oxley and the Lady Marion had arrived at the farmhouse - predictably - in the pre-dawn hour or so following the conclusion of the Nightwatch.

Upon his arrival, it had not taken Oxley long to set Wills Reddy to the task of something (Carter did not know exactly what) off in the countryside, nearby, or within, Hanton Forest - he thought he had overheard the British unit's commanding officer say.

It was odd to see Marion Nighten, voice of the Nightwatch, back at La Salle's farm. She had not attended upon them so since...since the hours immediately following her kidnapping. For which he, of course, was solely responsible. Not that Oxley's eyes ever let him forget it for long, despite the pseudo- peace accord the two men had struck publicly in from of the others that time in the barnyard.

How could he hold such enduring, hard feelings against the man? Doubtless in the same situation, he would handle himself far less well.

Carter had been on watch as the couple arrived, Lady Marion looking bright in the yet-dawnless morning - energized by something within, which did not quite track to anyone knowing the loss she had so recently suffered. Oxley, himself, was a predictable monolith of stone when encountering him. 'To business' and little more, dismissing him from his watch to rouse Reddy.

Which he had gladly done, joined - on his way back into the farmhouse - by the boy Djak. _Ever-present_, Carter thought, the boy's tenacious vigilance eternally surprising, and yet also pleasing, him.

By the time they had both worked to rouse Reddy (who tended toward sleepy-headedness more than some of the others), Oxley and his girl had La Salle woken as well. (Though in truth very little occurred in the Sarkese rector's home that he was not perceptive enough to witness first-hand.)

It was La Salle who had found Carter - for the moment absent Djak, who had chosen to hike with Wills toward his destination as far as the edge of La Salle's tenement - and informed him there was, as soon as could be managed, to be a wedding. And Carter - and the boy Djak - to stand witness to it.

"I shall leave it to you, Alex," La Salle had said in parting, "to explain it to the boy. There is something I must find before we may begin, and I will take a moment to speak to Robin and Lady Marion - both together and then alone - before your services will be needed."

At that La Salle had departed the kitchen for parts of the house unknown, leaving Carter with his astonishment at having been requested to partner the Lady Marion - the woman he had kidnapped and wounded - upon what he knew was commonly said to be the happiest occasion of any woman's life.

As all tenements on Sark were of modest acreage (and therefore not time-consuming to travel across), it was not long before Djak returned, seeking him in the kitchen rather than staying outside for the final moments of nighttime freedom before she would be confined - due to daylight - to the house.

"There is to be a wedding," Carter told her, as though debriefing a fellow soldier, not knowing how to stall or fancy-up the news.

"_Abiav_?" she questioned him in the Romany language. "Ceremony of the mingling of the blood?"

"Yes, that's the one," he agreed. "Though hopefully, any blood will mingle only figuratively," he added, thinking of Oxley's eyes, murder ever submerged within them when they looked at him. Knowing that there was no way Carter's selection as witness and partner in the ceremony to Lady Marion could have been at Oxley's consent.

The boy was too perceptive (and had been so for far too long) to have to ask for whom the ceremony was meant to be performed.

"What of the bride price?" Djak asked. "Lady Marion's father is dead. Who will pay it?"

"Ah, bride price," Carter mimed at considering the question, as though it were a head-scratcher. "It would appear that Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer has, in destroying Lady Marion's animal barn, burnt up the agreed-upon bride price of livestock with it. Oxley - your _rom baro_ - has therefore agreed to take her without."

The boy's eyes registered slight shock at this development, followed quickly by blossoming adoration - further adoration - of the unit's commander.

"We are to stand witness; I for the lady, you for Oxley."

The boy did not respond.

"Will you not question me further on the ancient ways of your people?" Carter inquired. "Ask if we will cast an enchantment, here - sprinkle pig's blood, there?" It was rare that he teased the boy.

Djak scoffed, but showed that she knew the remark for affectionate mocking. "I am not so idiot as to expect _Gadjo_ to marry in the way of Rom, am I? I do not expect them to be joined as we are joined. The Rom are a singular people."

"No," Carter agreed, now fully serious. "Not an idiot. Your English is becoming good. Your teacher, Reddy, I think must be proud."

It was slight, but his eyes caught the corners of the Gypsy boy's mouth point slightly higher than they usually did when at rest.

"I am in need of you, as well," Carter announced, standing from the table to take his empty cup to the washbasin.

"I will do what you want, Flight Commander Thomas Carter." The boy replied, as he often did, with Carter's full military title.

_Perhaps he does not realize it's a military designation_, Carter had thought more than once. _Perhaps he thinks it's bequeathed nobility. A 'my lord', or 'your highness'_.

"Find me something in the house - or barn - (though I doubt there is anything suitable in the barn) that will stand for a woman's headcovering. Perhaps the silken scarf you stole from Abby Rufford that saw us exiled from her home."

The boy's nose wrinkled in response to the resurrecting of his faults. "For the lady?" he asked.

Carter nodded. "And hold your bird - " he ordered, the dove in question perched as it often was on Djak's shoulder.

Obediently Djak held the bird as, to Djak's curious eye, Carter disengaged the metal band that assisted in its carrying of messages from about its leg.

Using a butter knife and a bit of elbow grease, with a whisper of artistry, Carter had the pliable metal cuff shaped into something as like a circular ring as might be - only a few millimeters shy of matching up. A reasonable approximation of a woman's delicate wedding band.

Djak gave him an intense look in response to his several moments of work with the metal.

"You are a..._knowing_ man," he said to him, and before Carter could ask for clarification about what, exactly, he had meant, the boy was half out of the room, calling over his shoulder, "I get the other."

And Carter was left to his thoughts.

_A knowing man_, he considered. Of course, on such things, he was a knowing man. He had barely been into double digits of age when he had come to live in an exclusively female household. His mother's and Babushka's wedding rings more precious to them than any of their previous jewels.

He thought of the last, true wedding he had attended. Not the reduced-circumstances weddings they had from time to time attended in Hoboken, or nearby cities. White Russia without its pomp, its elegance, the ceremonies status quo, contemporarily American - or rife with the borrowed opulence of the local Eastern Orthodox Church - the paste crowns and diadems for the bride and groom used repeatedly in each ceremony. Those being wed having left - having lost - their own such finery, such genuinely jeweled coronets, in Russia. Along with their houses, their dowries, the authority of their titles. The power of their level of rank.

He thought of the Lady Marion today. Knew that were this to be her wedding in England, not the Occupied Islands, she would wear a jeweled symbol of her station upon her head, precious stones at her throat and wrist.

Oxley, possibly, a sword at his side. Braid upon his coat. White gloves.

A grand cathedral set aside to hold those members of the English aristocracy who wished to witness an auspicious joining of their own.

Eighteen or more bridesmaids. Footmen. Choristers. Crowds of commoners thronging for a view.

He could not immediately recall what Reddy had told him Oxley's title and station was, but he did recall that it was a significant one. As was Marion's. So, take what he had imagined, double it.

He was not foolish enough to think either bride or bridegroom would pine for such pageantry today, here in Blind La Salle's homey farmhouse. But he felt as though he knew that a little something - even an only half-complete circle of a ring, a swatch of fabric to cover the bride's head - would not go unappreciated.

It was not so different, perhaps, from what one heard of happening on the homefront. A soldier on a few hours' leave, grabbing his girl, getting their paperwork in order and making a mad dash for any Justice of the Peace to see the job done, the certificate signed, the deal sealed, all before he was due back on base. Before he was again shipped out. Grabbing at happiness - at love? Before the moment evaporated. Before the dreaded telegrams might come, before the chance of being together was lost to war. Lost to what the world had become.

Djak raced back into the kitchen, pride showing on his face over his find. "Okay, yes?"

He held in his hands an exquisite length of broad, hand-sewn lace, the color only a shade lighter than a barely-brown eggshell.

"You have not just found this for the first time today," Carter half-accused, his hand busy at feeling the infinitesimally small knots of the delicate threads.

"No," Djak agreed. "Okay, yes?"

"Only found what for the first time today?" La Salle asked, walking into the kitchen where he was about to let the witnesses know they were ready to begin.

Carter and Djak each took a corner of the fabric length and placed them into the blind rector's hands. The exquisite cloth's weight and bulk amounted to little more than mounded spider webs in his broad, farmer's grip.

Stephen's calloused fingertips danced over the lace as though its knots were the very language of Braille itself. "Djak," he spoke. "This is good. A good thing to have found. It is Madame La Salle's." He smiled, unable, even in the moment of memory, to allow any sadness to show in his demeanor. "She sewed it herself to wear on our wedding day." He brought it to his face to smell, its age (and time packed away) requiring that he imagine any long-disappeared scent of his absent wife. "Yes," he said, encouraging the young boy, "off to Lady Marion with it. And you deserve all thanks she affords you."

"It has been long years since I have seen such fine handiwork," Carter told the proud husband, its affect upon him genuine.

"I look forward to the day you may shake the graceful hand by which it was made," La Salle told him. "Though when Louise has come home, Alex, I doubt I shall let those hands long out of mine own." Remembering himself, he cleared his throat. "Come," he encouraged Carter, "_we've_ two hands to join - before Wills and the others return."

* * *

Marion had been surprised by the boy Djak's - check that, the secret _girl_ Djak's - appearance moments before she was to join Stephen in the downstairs parlor. Djak held in her arms a length of handmade lace, and even before Marion could think to mourn the lack of hairpins to secure it, Djak craftily produced them as well.

"From Flight Commander Thomas Carter," she told Marion, her Gypsy-trained beauty-hungry eye impressed by the magnificence of the lace mantilla as it covered Marion's dark hair, the finished edge sitting just above her dark brows, its length falling over her shoulders and down her back to her calves, nearly negating the fact Lady Marion (of necessity) needs must wear trousers to her own wedding.

"Thank you," Marion told Djak, able to see some reflection of herself in the very modestly-sized looking glass upon the bedroom's bureau.

"Is he waiting, downstairs?" Marion asked the girl. "I confess, I am not sure how to carry on. Before this," she indicated the added formality of the headcovering, "I assumed we'd all just walk in, as we might any other day. Now - things somehow feel...monumental."

Djak did not fully understand the words Marion spoke, nor the myriad broken English wedding customs to which she alluded, but she recognized uncertainty in Marion's eyes, and could recall enough of her past life before the war to know that brides often had a way of becoming shy or reticently modest just before the ceremony, no matter their day-to-day personalities.

"Come," she beckoned Marion, extending her hand to be held, and walking with her down the steps and to the home's front sitting room.

Upon entering the room they stood upon no particular ceremony. It looked, generally, like it did every other day. Stephen and Robin occupied a portion of it, Robin's back to them, Carter standing slightly apart from the two men, his shirt buttoned to the neck, his worn and misused RAF uniform coat brought out from its hiding place and also buttoned to within an inch of its life.

The past weeks had proven good to him, and the weight he had once shed so abruptly during his harsh captivity was finding its way back to his bones, into muscle, filling out the tailoring of his uniform, despite the fabric's becoming tatty, and he looked appreciably less of a scarecrow than he had. The dyed ginger hair and (meant-to-disguise-him) florid side-whiskers proved an attractive color counterpoint to his RAF blue.

At the sound of their arrival, Robin turned toward them. Djak dropped her hand to join Carter, and Marion gasped in shock.

How he had found the time to do it, she did not know. Perhaps securing and settling Madame La Salle's veil to her satisfaction had taken her longer than she knew. But there was Robin. _Her Robin_. Shaved, barefaced, like as when he was born. Like as when she had last seen him on a pier - herself a great distance away on an oceanliner bound for America.

"What have you done?" she cried, forgetting the others in the room.

Robin shrugged, the newly bared skin on his face strange in its uncovering. "Simply tried to uncover the man for you, today of all days." He smiled.

Marion felt as though she hardly knew how to speak to him, this man she had not seen since 1939. _This_ man, that had died not a year later.

She took a step toward him and extended her hand to his now-downy cheek, the tint of his skin above his beard-line darkened from sun and island chores. The newly exposed skin light as any up-all-night, sleep-all-day playboy layabout's might be.

"Oh, but I liked it," she told him, with regret for the beard's loss, bringing the back of her knuckles along his sleek jawline. "I truly did."

At this he chuckled. Of course, there was no knowing how best to please her. But it angered him not a bit. Taking her hand from his face and holding it in his own, he promised, "then consider it growing back in as of this minute."

She returned his smile.

"Before we begin," Stephen spoke, " - and I have already been over this with Robin and Lady Marion - I will tell you," he looked to Carter and Djak, "because you are not fully versed in our customs and laws, that there is no divorce on Sark. Here, it is not granted, and divorce decreed elsewhere is not recognized. What we seek to do here today binds to the grave."

Djak's brow crinkled at the word 'divorce', and Carter attempted to render explanation of it in Russian. It took a long moment, but the boy eventually nodded his understanding.

And Stephen began.

Robin had her hands. Without a bouquet, she had given him both. As her hands threatened to tremble, she thought of how his hands and fingers never fiddled about as they had in the past. No longer danced with impatience, fluttered with inner unrest.

She had given him an engraved cigarette case once as a gift. An engagement gift, in fact. It had fast become his favorite plaything, ever slipping and sliding acrobatically through his constantly moving fingers. He was never without it, and rarely dropped it, his fingers too agile, too practiced in their perpetual restlessness.

_Strange_, she had thought - for them to find their peace now, here, during a war, an Occupation, a stranding of his men far from contact with their command. She had not directly asked him about their once-constant motion. She _had_ asked after the case.

"In a lock-up, I do not doubt," he told her, "at headquarters. Once we were listed dead they required anything personalized of ours. Photographs, monogrammed handkerchiefs, even, things of personal significance. I managed to keep it held back for several weeks, but they got it off me one day in hospital when I fell asleep." His eyes had hardened. "Which was damnably unfair."

"And what did you find to toy with, then?" she asked, not showing how much it had touched her that he was so loathe to be separated from it.

"Kept my fists full of fags, I reckon," he answered, surprising her.

"But now...I never see you smoke."

"Nor _do_ I smoke," he confessed. "Oh, I always have some on me - helpful in the Black Market here, and one never wants to have to deny his mate bumming a smoke. But I'm through. Had my last three days after landing on the islands. Realized one more smoker meant less smokes for the unit entire. And a small joy is still a small joy. Especially in such times lean on pleasure. So I try and help out - keeping my lips off their small joys."

"And do they know?" she asked. "Why you quit?"

He had merely shrugged.

* * *

They were about to give their vows and consent when Carter broke in by clearing his throat. Marion felt Robin's right hand tense slightly in her left.

"Sir," Carter addressed Stephen, "we do have a ring."

Stephen put out an open hand to receive the small, incomplete band Carter deposited in it.

With his other hand, Stephen felt of the pigeon band's imperfect circular construction, and began to speak on the symbol of eternity as illustrated by a wedding band.

"To be joined in marriage, to become one, and to covenant with each other lasts until the end of what we, as individuals, understand as time. Until the moment we breathe no longer upon this Earth. And though this ring is truncated to the eye - even, to the touch - the bonds created by such a union exist yet in the ether, traveling - as even I can tell you - far beyond the borders of this small island, beyond the passage of time or the changes age and separate experience may bring about. _If you will let them_. If you will each humble yourself, and dedicate yourself to what promises you have entered into today. And if today you are sincere in your pledge. Robert Oxley," they had chosen to forego using their longer, more formal names and titles, "if you so wish to proceed, repeat after me..."

_With this ring, I thee wed._

Marion thought to herself that, oddly, this moment seemed like an echo of something that had already taken place at sometime in the past. Not new, not...original.

They two had stood here together before, surely, these words had passed between them. This bond long ago forged.

Time became blurry. They were always wed, always meant for one another.

_This gold and silver, I thee give_.

She saw, for the first time up close, the ring Carter had managed to scrounge from somewhere. She seriously doubted it contained either gold, or silver. And yet. And yet she knew she would cherish it as though it were crafted of Heaven's very dust.

_With my body, I thee worship_.

She felt, more than heard, Robin's voice shake ever so slightly on 'body'.

_And with all my worldly goods I thee endow_.

Their worldly goods, now so insignificant. Three-quarters of a ring. Borrowed clothing. Nowhere between the two of them to call home. Barred from their bank accounts. Robin, unable to redeem whatever cheques the Army might issue to him across the Channel, her, without a paying profession. Destitute, but together.

_In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost_.

Robin took the fragile ring and placed it momentarily over each finger, starting with her thumb, over each it hovered, like a child's game, as he named off the Trinity. Lastly, at the closing word, settling it upon her ring finger.

_Amen_.

The brief exchange of their intentions, the reciting of their vows, could not have encompassed more than ten minutes. At the conclusion, Stephen directed his unseeing gaze to them and asked of Robin, "will you kiss the bride?"

And she was a wife.

* * *

"Now, to the particulars," Stephen encouraged them toward the kitchen table, where a large and seemingly antique volume was laid out upon the trestle table.

Marion had forgotten. Of course, they must sign the register.

"We three witnesses," the rector nodded to Carter and Djak, "have been well-chosen. Although no one is either asked or encouraged to lie about what took place today, discretion, Robin and I both agree, is preferable. We already have plenty to conceal - the two of you not the least of which is yourselves. And so we shall tender this moment to that same vault." His hand reached for, and found, Djak's shoulder. "In an effort to frustrate anyone with ill intent researching today's happening, I have retrieved the oldest church register with which I have been entrusted. Sark's Parish Church of St. Mary, its last entry made in the year of our Lord 1230. Alex has agreed to write out the citation for us to sign and make formal and official by Sarkese law, as the register is primarily in Norman French, and his written French is very finely rendered I am told." La Salle gestured to one of several blank, ancient pages of yellowed paper in the back of the leather-bound book, and a pot of ink and accompanying pen.

Carter set to the task while Robin and Marion watched over his shoulder as his writing flowed in great, artistic flourishes, in the way his Frenchman tutor had long and strictly instructed him as a boy. And in the way that even after all this time, his once oft-drilled fingers had never forgotten.

When he had completed the day's assertion (mimicking the format of prior entries), Robin read it aloud for Stephen's benefit. And they each took their turn signing in the proper places. Robin and Marion now made use, in their signatures, of their full names and titles. Stephen was helped to know where to write his own name, and the two witnesses found themselves in the interesting - but uncommon - position of signing _their_ actual names.

Carter looked about him, and recalled that Stephen already had most of his personal story, and would be unable to see anyway, and as the bride and groom were far too taken with each other at present to notice, signed himself double: both as _RAF Flight Cmdr. Thomas Carter_, and then, in Cyrillic so unused it ought to have caused his knuckles to creak as though rusty when he penned it, _Alexsei Igorovich, Prince Komonoff_.

So pre-occupied with risking himself in such a public and final way, he nearly did not notice when the Gypsy boy Djak wrote _his_ name. Carter could not read the Romany language, but still, his mind tugged at him, the letters written down seemed unlikely to coalesce into a name sounding of 'Djak'.

He gave the boy a mildly questioning look, which the boy coolly deflected.

As the Lady Marion was removing Madame La Salle's veil, La Salle lifted the volume from the table, confident the ink had had time to set and dry, and wrapped it in a nearby, waiting piece of strong oilcloth.

"To the side of the house, Alex," he directed. "Near the wild bluebells, I should think. Bury it deep enough that it might not be noticed, but not so very deeply that we may not find it again."

* * *

Marion had not known what she thought, what she expected might happen next. A humble toast, perhaps? Of La Salle's mythical (she had heard so much about it) cider? The offer of a bed, or bedroom in which to sleep - she and Robin well-spent after a night of the Nightwatch and travel to Sark, and it now nearly seven-thirty in the morning?

But she had certainly not expected to be whisked off into the forest. Not that on Sark, generally, there was much in the landscape to designate with that geographical label.

"In the 1500s, I am told," Robin had said to her, as they came in sight of a small, forested area, "the Sarkese people built single-story two room houses in clusters at the heads of valleys, nearby fresh water sources. But in later days they were abandoned. Most are fallen in, but one day Wills and I managed to find one or two that were repairable. And so we _have_ done," he beamed at her proudly. They were within the tree cover now, and shortly did come upon Wills himself, bending in his height to exit a small stone house, its insides lit by a fire on its hearth, the smoke of it coming from the chimney concealed among the height of the tightly-growing trees.

"Will you stand us a watch, my friend?" Robin asked Wills.

Reddy nodded, having expected something of this nature when he had first been tasked with coming to tidy the house.

"Good man," Robin told him, slapping him on the back.

He offered him no news. Neither of Mitch, nor the ceremony so recently passed.

* * *

And so here she was. She could not say how much later. The bedding in Robin's 'house' was not elevated, but on the swept-dirt floor. There were plenty of blankets, though, and the room's interior could not have been tidier, though it was entirely without ornament or furniture of any kind. A netting bag hung from a hook near the fireplace, well off the floor, filled, she assumed, with some things for them to eat by and by.

Under the covers she - and he - were totally bared. In this small but dense patch of trees about the two still-standing houses, very little light shone through, this small fire the only source of seeing, though closer to midday she expected that might change for several hours.

But they were not cold. _Queer_, she thought. How chilling lone nudity can be, and yet, joined nudity, here, under a single cover, on the ground, in a strange place and with only the slightest of fires, how cozy warm. How unexpectedly snug.

She re-positioned herself and felt his sleeping hand and arm respond by stroking along her undressed side. Unconsciously, perhaps, for him, but the gesture, the caress, still full-bodied and arousing for her.

When they had arrived within the house, Wills a good distance off, ensuring their safety, Robin had announced this place, his 'camp' in this wooded valley, was known as Hanton Forest to the locals, though he agreed with her, that only on Sark would a healthy-sized coppice of trees earn the title 'forest'.

It was after they had physically sealed their joining as man and wife, after they had first assayed becoming one and she lay in his arms that he spun her a story of this place. It was a sleepy sort of tale. They were both quite sleepy, and it had many stops and starts, and long moments for silent consideration.

"There is a tale," he told her, his voice similar in its timbre to a deep sigh, or a beating heart, "'says Hanton Forest is the home to something quite special. Quite unique the world over: the last unicorn. It is here he lives, after all this time, the last of his kind. Lonely, without a mate." Here he gave her a squeeze. "Perhaps we might sight him," he challenged her.

Moments passed while neither spoke, before he began again. "Do you know why it is that he has come to be here, my darling? Why, of all places, Sark? This thicket of trees? _This_ sixteenth-century ruin? Because Sark is one of the last places on earth where true magic can hide. Where true magic can live, even in present times."

Silently they lay, each considering this new myth.

"Well, if we have brought any little magic with us this day," Marion after awhile answered him. "Then I suggest we attempt some conjuring, and find him a wife."

Robin bent to kiss her between her shoulder blades. "I shall be with you directly, Mrs. Oxley," he told her, his voice awash in drowsiness. "To return to 'conjuring'. But do not hurry me along just now. There will be more time shortly. Your honeymoon is not yet spent."

He had not managed to hang on to consciousness long after that, and neither, truly, had she.

Yet, she was certain, not long after, here she was, awake. Herself quite alert. She tried not to feel the pressure of passing time, yet she knew that by the early morning she must return to Guernsey for the Nightwatch.

When she had shared that with Robin on the boat ride here, he had only quoted to her from the old rhyme, "_The deer he loves the high wood/The hare she loves the hill/The knight he loves his bright sword/The lady - loves her will_."

He had not argued with her or attempted to change her mind.

And later she had not told him - nor would she - that as they had stood in La Salle's kitchen this morning, signing their names to the marriage they had entered into, she had had the briefest flash - a horrid one - wherein she saw them all dead, as though a massacre had occurred in that very room. Carter's blood mixed in with Djak's. La Salle crumpled to the floor, and herself floating above it all like a ghost. And Robin - Robin rushing in the barnyard door, to find them all so.

She had made a great effort to swallow the unexpected thought, to disallow its hijacking of her day, her present happiness.

Indeed, the lady had done what she willed. Marion Nighten was not going to let potential regrets (let alone future, unknowable regrets) cloud her present.

Anymore than she would let primitive accommodations dampen her honeymoon.

She had what she had wanted: Robin. In a burst of connection, she realized that he was now her family. He was now, as their lying here together illustrated, her flesh.

She felt of a Guernsey Gache, the popular island fruitcake with currants; its recipe calling for a depression to be made in its dough. To make it; mix, knead...let rise.

For so long that depression had been there, deflated, central to her being. But now, now she felt herself on the rise. Felt herself becoming what she had originally been crafted to be.

"How dare you remove yourself even an inch away from me, Woman," she heard a now-wakeful Robin threaten from over her shoulder.

She felt the sensation and pressure as his hand slid a thumb down the side of her unexpectedly passion-swollen breasts, and brought its welcome fingers to bear on the bone and indent of her naked hip.

There was no longer any beard to tickle when he warned her, "I am not even the half finished with you."

**...TBC...**


	29. End Part One

**ALDERNEY - Treeton Camp -** Naturally it would be _his_ lot that in the Kommandant's absence from the island, Underlieutenant Diefortner would be tasked to _his_ camp, to _his_ side. Nipping at _his _heels all the day long.

"Well, you haven't found a secretarial replacement," Diefortner had reminded him when he had introduced himself that morning. "I shall set about sorting your papers."

But of course such a man had not been able to sort _only _papers.

"Did you miss the Nightwatch?" Diefortner had asked, doubtless knowing full well that due to unsteady seas Gisbonnhoffer had not arrived back to Alderney until well after the broadcast had ended.

Gisbonnhoffer grunted.

"Too bad," the Underlieutenant had faked commiseration, withholding sharing what had taken place in order to spite his superior, and pay him back for Gisbonnhoffer's foul temper toward him.

"Bad luck, that," he had continued on, glossing over the Nightwatch news, knowing he had left Gisbonnhoffer on tenterhooks, "the Guernsey archives torched halfway beyond saving. Crimp in your master plan, that has proven."

Gisbonnhoffer rolled one irritated eye over toward where the Kommandant's adjutant sat, certainly not thrilled presently at being reminded of his highly risky plan to smoke out Marion's wedding certificate under the guise of looking for information on the Nightwatch.

"But the less said about that, the better," Diefortner bent his head back to his work.

"The less _said _the better all 'round." Gisbonnhoffer both agreed and admonished him, reassuring himself that there was no way even the ambitious Diefortner could have known what he had truly been up to. No way, surely, he could even have suspected a ruse of any kind at play. After all, it was better than common knowledge that SS Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer lived for two things: advancement in the ranks, and capturing the islands' infamous illegal broadcaster, the Nightwatch (yet another key to advancement in the ranks). It was only lately that he had let his passion for Marion Nighten cloud his focus. Gisbonnhoffer gave an uncomfortable wince at the thought of Marion, of her name.

"Speaking of civic records," the other man withdrew a paper from within the messy pile in front of him. "I see here the initial legal paperwork has arrived for you to complete to file for your divorce back home. Shall I assist by getting started in the filling of it out?"

"_NO_," and the word rang out as though Gisbonnhoffer's office were located inside a large, reverberating church bell, rather than in a hurriedly-assembled wooden building. "That will no longer be...necessary," he replied, those words sour as over-fermented kraut upon his lips, in his mind.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Heindl Cottage -** The dismaying thought came to Mitch again: the idiot Navigation Officer, unable to locate himself upon the globe. In France..._somewhere_.

But of an evening the stars never looked right to him, never looked _at home_. The terrain...not quite _foreign_ enough. _What an ignorant booby_. So poorly suited to his present situation that he had actually attempted to get the information from the girl, from Eva.

She had looked at him in that way she had, in the way where he felt he could read every sorrow of her young life there within her eyes (those eyes so often jolly, those sorrows deeply submerged), and told him that he was in France. And that she could say no more, lest she see her own family suffer for it.

"Please do not run, _Monsieur _Miller," she had begged him. "Do not try for the distant coast, nor for the town. Do not jeopardize us. You do care for us some, do you not, Sir?"

"_Mitch_," he had prompted her. "Please," he had said, hating to hear such a sweet, kind and giving girl address him so formally; she, who had brought him out of his peril, out of his pain and the empty loneliness of torture. Pulled him single-handedly back from the brink of darkness. Surely they two ought to be on far less-formal terms.

He attempted to sink what he could of himself into the rather cramped washtub that served the Heindl family entire for baths. After all, all those weeks she had - even within the cottage alone (the rare privacy granted so that he might have a head-to-toe wash) he blushed red as beet from scalp to sole - she had seen to even his most basic need. Such as washing. _Well, hopefully not Eva_. Not Eva tasked with the washing of a grown man's body, no matter how infirm he might have been.

Yes, perhaps the task had fallen to mad Hilda. Mitch's nose wrinkled, but some of the blush receded. Not ideal, naturally, to think of his physical self at the mercy of the loony mother of the house, but preferable, yes, preferable to tender Eva.

Sweet, generous Eva.

_Oh Lord, Robin_, he thought. _How shall I ever run? How could I live with myself, with possibly causing Eva hurt - or the girls? The baby - or Daniel, not yet a man? Or even, heaven help me, mad batty Hilda?_

And I know not where I am, he spoke as if to his dear, lost friend and commanding officer. _And I do not know where to go to change that._

Oh, help me, Robin. Help me.

* * *

**BRITAIN - Rural Scotland -**Madame La Salle hugged little Stephen's hand to her as she exited the kirk's Sunday morning service. The farmer and his wife tended to stay behind and fellowship for a time with friends, and frequently the minister, but she had always found a freedom in the moments following a good sermon and rousing singing service that made her want to be outside, to be alone. Continuing on in the communion that she had shared, silently, within the church's walls.

She set out on the path toward the farm, imagining that they were likely to have chops again for the midday meal. As it was late autumn, the farmer and his wife had recently slaughtered a hog, and besides their own enjoyment of it were pleased to see that pork was fast becoming one of little Stephen's favorite foods.

Louise had not gone far, as she could travel no faster than little Stephen's short legs would carry him, when she turned in response to the sound of someone walking double-time to catch up with her.

"Louise," the man behind her on the road called, seeing that she had turned back.

"Yes," she called. "What is it?" always aware that her voice held none of the rough, brusqueness as did those of the locals. Nor was she built like them; sturdy, peasant-strong. Hardy, she had heard them called.

But the French in her blood would always come through. If not in her speech, then in her tastes. She knew that even the clothes she chose to make for herself - chose to wear - were not much like those of the Scottish women around her.

Her frame was slender, and her height negligible. She had once overheard the farmer's wife referring to her as delicate. Saying that she was surprised how much such a 'delicate little thing' managed to accomplish in the course of a day of farming.

The notion of herself as somehow less substantial than those she found herself living among did not generally sit well with Louise. But she could not deny feeling that 'otherness' - without having to have it pointed out to her.

The man had caught up with her. Seeing it was the village blacksmith, and guessing at his intentions, she again set to walking.

"Good day, Louise."

She did not care for his casual use of her first name. On she walked. "Good day."

"I always like to see ye about," he told her, a smile upon his face, keeping pace with her.

Unable to echo his meant-to-flatter remark, she offered no reply.

"I was thinkin'..."

And she knew it was too late to stop him.

"That you might, that is, that _we might _go walkin' out this evening - or next, if you'd prefer."

"Go walkin' out?" she repeated back to him. "You forget yourself, Luke Cooper. I am a married woman, as you well know. As the whole village well knows. A married woman, and what's more, with a child. _Sacre_! I'll go walking with no man - Scot or Briton - until I've my own husband by my side."

"But Louise," Cooper attempted to plead with her, "the war. The Occupation. How long's it been since you've seen your man - even, since you've heard from him? Since he's wrote to you?"

She took a deep breath and let her eyes close and settle for a moment. "Luke Cooper," she told him, "you are a good man. _I _know that. It is commonly known, and said - that you are a fine man. And run a fair business. That you'll cheat no one, even those others believe deserve cheating. I have not seen Reverend La Salle," she deliberately made use of Stephen's title, "since June of '40. Nor have I received word from him since that day."

"Three and a half years!" the smithy exclaimed.

"'_For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband as long as he liveth._'," she quoted the letter of St. Paul to the Romans to him. "Three and a half years. But a short time in God's eyes," she told him, "and it was in the presence of Him that my husband and I made our vow."

* * *

**1940 June - GUERNSEY -**"Dick, can you dock us? Is there space on a day such as this?" Stephen asked his hired man of the crowded surroundings of St. Peter Port's piers.

"We will manage," Dick assured him from where he piloted the La Salle fishing boat.

Louise La Salle had found it impossible to settle and sit down on the voyage from Creux Harbor that morning. Stephen had wanted to take her to the Dixcart Hotel for breakfast, as a sort of special 'going away' treat, but she had not been able to bring herself to go.

"No," she had told him, "it is my own kitchen I shall want tomorrow, my own things, in their own, dear places. Let us eat at home, my love. My sweet, sweet _homme_."

She looked to her husband now, also standing in the fishing boat. Knowing they were headed to Guernsey, a trip they seldom, if ever, made (Dick traveling there _for _them with whatever might occasionally be leftover to sell at the market day there), had brought out their best clothes, and Stephen was outfitted as fine as he might have been any Sunday he were set to give a sermon.

His reddish hair took in the sunlight, and his height was undimmed by the infirmity that had stolen his vision. He was a singularly handsome man, she thought.

She had dressed as sensibly as possible. Crossing the channel in open boats - the only option for evacuation at this point - was nothing to take lightly. Over her best winter dress (yes, even in June) she would have with her in her single piece of luggage the ability to pull on Stephen's best fisherman's sweater of Sarkese wool, its recognizable Jersey knit already like a callback to home for her, though she had not yet left.

People were everywhere, arriving at the port in boats, thronging the gangplanks and jetties as far as the eye could see. To call it an organized chaos would have been far too kind.

Nearby where they were able to find room to tie off, they could hear a man in charge calling out the names that had been submitted and assigned to his boat. "Heindl!" he shouted into the din after consulting his clipboard. "Five passages granted! Heindl family!"

He received no reply from among the crowd, and turned to the man beside him. "No shows," he shook his head. "And down here for four children - and a nursing mother to boot. What can they be thinking? Changing their minds at a time like this?"

The man next to him shrugged, "not every islander's at peace with shipping their brood off to strangers, Germans headed this way or no. P'r'aps we'd do just as well to see after the children, among their own kind."

Louise turned to Stephen, knowing the bustle of the wharf was likely playing havoc with his perception, over-stimulating his already heightened senses.

"I do not wish to go," she told him, for what was not the first time. "We will be okay, surely. The Lord will care for us, Stephen, as He always has." She reached her hand toward his own. "Here, as well as He might anywhere. If there is any Jew within me, after all, I must have lost it - washed it off as a child. It can do us no harm."

"No," he shook his head. "We must not falter now," Stephen told her, taking his hand and settling it on her going-into-town set hair. "Two months apart is a long time, but it is nothing compared to the rumors we have heard of what might happen if you were to stay." He gave a slow smile. "Do let me take care of you in this way - as you have for so many years put my welfare first, and taken care of me."

She let herself follow her hand toward him, let herself sink into him, in a way they never would have acted out among people, save that it was the day it was. The day of goodbye, of farewell, and of uncertain futures.

"And I see a blessing for you, Madame La Salle," he told her, and though his eyes were cloudy in their blindness, she knew they bore a twinkle. "You can be a blessing in the crossing. Able to help comfort the children. A good work. And a blessing to you."

Louise had a great affection for children, of all ages. In his attempt to embolden and cheer her, Stephen did not reference (nor did he need to) their own frequent failures when it came to babies, came to enlarging their family beyond merely the two of them.

They had reached that moment - that moment that she had known would come if they agreed to pursue her evacuating. The moment in which they could say nothing more of any significance to the other that had not already been said, been proven and tested through action and through trials in the years of their marriage. Both felt it, both sensed it as though with a single, shared perception.

"Dick," called Stephen, Louise still tight to his strong chest, "lead us on to where we must part with Madame La Salle."

At Stephen's request, young Giddons leaned over and lifted the small traveling bag Louise had packed to take with her.

As they disembarked the boat, in one of Stephen's hands was the oversized walking staff he used to help find and clear his way when he had to move about in unfamiliar places. In the other, his grip on her firm, Louise.

* * *

Dick Giddons stood, feeling La Salle's strong hand clutched upon his shoulder, ensuring they did not become parted in the crowd. The small vessel - certainly not deserving of the title of 'ship' - holding Madame La Salle was pulling out, away from port. It was stuffed to the point of near-capsizing with children of every shape and size. Besides the pilot, she was the only other adult assigned to it; adults allowed to evacuate either mothers to the very, very young, or those with Jewish heritage.

Some children cried, others looked back as their home grew smaller and smaller, their faces stoic. Madame held two boys, barely toddlers, too confused to cry, to grasp what was happening.

"How looks she to you, Dick?" La Salle asked him, a man who rarely asked for others to recount to him what their eyes beheld.

"She looks like a mother," Dick heard himself say, not having meant to speak that off-the-cuff thought aloud.

"And what told she you before you handed her down the gangway?"

"That God will look after us each," the boy's mouth twitched into a half-grin, "and that she expected to next see me grown fat on your rich cooking."

Stephen smiled. "And did she kiss you goodbye?"

"Yessir, that she did. On my cheek," the boy spoke with a small amount of wonder in his tone. Madame La Salle had never acted so before.

Stephen's hand reached up and felt for Dick's rarely-needing-shaved cheek, finding the spot that his fingers told him held his wife's last salute - her last physical connection to the islands - -until she was able to return.

"God save the King, our Duke," Stephen said aloud, his face to the water. "God shelter our Sark. God save us all."

* * *

**USA - outside Lexington, Kentucky -**"Ma-ma!" nineteen year-old Josie Otto ran pell-mell down the staircase of the Otto family home shouting. She had only just changed out of a stable-mucked pair of dungarees into a more suitable 'going out' skirt and blouse, bobby socks rather than nylons inside her shoes. Upstairs in her room she had forgotten to take the needle off the Tommy Dorsey/Frank Sinatra record she had been playing.

"Baby Girl," her mother's voice, always able to be heard clearly without respect to the volume she pitched it at, came to her from the front parlor.

Josie continued on her dash to that location.

"You have forgotten again," her mama continued from behind where she was studying the recent horse sales as printed in the _Lexington Leader_. "Your daddy's daddy paid good money to have a house built. So that we have no need to live in the barn." She bent the corner of the paper down to look her youngest child in the eye, "nor to act as though we do."

"Well, Mama," Josie tried to make up with her mother without technically having to apologize, "it ain't like anyone's home but us chickens."

Mama grunted, and set the paper, folded, into her lap, watching as her youngest child sneaked a sip of sweet tea that had just been brought in by Azalea, the maid. "And just where are you, _Chicken_, off to?" An indulgent but you-won't-get-anything-over-on-me smile bloomed on her lips.

"Thought I'd told you. Bessie Queenland's had a letter from Fred. When I saw her last week I asked if I might come over and copy it down - since we know you won't be visiting the Queenland's anytime soon." At this gibe, Josie's smile echoed something of her mother's.

"Have mercy! Y'all did _not _say that to Bessie Queenland!"

Josie half-giggled and nearly coughed from the bite of Derby pie she had jammed into her mouth before she could be denied it. "Naw, Mama. I mentioned you not one _bit_during the entire conversation."

"Thank Heavens for small graces!" Mama took a swallow of relief from her tall glass of sweet tea.

"I don't see why you should dislike them so," Josie said, "after all. They're a nice family. They love to talk horses."

"And they stole the Templar Cup from us two years running. With horses brought here from..._Australia_," her mother gave the country name five or more syllables. "What sort of pedigree is that?"

"Well," Josie stood to knock crumbs off her blouse from where they had settled, "they were Australian themselves only a few years ago. But you haven't had to worry about them bringing horses from their farms in Australia for years now, what with the war blocking that kind of shipping and travel. How long before you make up with them?"

Mama looked at her daughter, as though sizing her up. "Well, give an old woman another year - or two - and we'll see."

"You're not a bit old," Josie protested. "And you went to Jeff's funeral."

"Yes. But he wasn't a Queenland. Only bound to marry one," Mama gave a half-wink at her own prevaricating. "And that was an act of gentility, Baby Girl. Of decency. It had nothing at all to do with competition."

* * *

When Josie arrived behind the wheel of the borrowed family car at the Queenland property, she sighted the three-star banner hanging in the window to designate that the family had sent three sons to the war. The black wreath adorning the front door next to the stars in the window glass served as a reminder of Jeff's death, and of his fiance, Bessie, still being in mourning for his loss.

"Had you heard in Fred's last letter?" Bessie asked when they had sat down, and Josie had taken out pen and paper to transcribe her brother's letter to Jeff's bereaved fiancee. "He signed here as '_Lieutenant Colonel Fred Otto_'."

Josie whistled out loud and long. "He sure can get himself promoted." She had her head to her work as she added, "he told me once if you want to be a five-star general all you have to do in this war is manage to stay alive, and the promotions will fall from heaven like rain." Josie felt the last of her words fall flat, and realized how crass they must sound to a girl recently having lost her fella to the war. She was glad her face was to the paper and her blush could not be seen.

"It was such a nice letter that he wrote," Bessie tried to cover for Josie's unintentional blunder. "All about Jeff, and the kind of man he was. Do you think - "

"Do I think what?" Josie turned back around to Bessie and set her elbow over the back of the wooden desk chair.

"Do you think Fred would mind if I...wrote him back? I've been writing Jeff letters for so long it will seem strange to simply..._stop_. And there are so many things in my mind that seem like they need to be...written down. And maybe sent away from me. Does that sound strange?"

"Dunno," Josie answered with a shrug, nearing the letter's end and now seeing Fred's new title in his signature for herself. "Kinda sounds like a lonely soldier's dream: mail from home."

* * *

**USA - Hoboken, New Jersey -** Olive Carter sat in her living room, joined by her mother-in-law and her granddaughter. Zara played upon the large braided rug in front of the radio where the music program was playing, "_Somewhere Over the Rainbow_." It was evening, and they often spent their free time thus when it became too chilly to sit on the porch and watch the happenings in the neighborhood.

Olive examined Tamara out of the corner of her eye - a trick she had learned from her former life at Court. It was the rare person who could catch her out at doing it.

There had been a visitor today, when she had been the only one home. When Tamara had stepped out to have her shoes re-soled, and taken the child with her on the errand.

McLellan, the one-legged Western-Union man who had not been seen in long, long weeks, had appeared on the step of number 832, ringing the bell and delivering a telegram.

She had not invited him in. Shared no true pleasantries with him. It was the telegram that she had been expecting. The one that would tell her that Thomas was dead.

But instead it had told her that his status had been changed from 'missing in action' to 'prisoner of war'.

But she was not such a fool to think this was the first such telegram. Which meant that Tamara had been keeping secrets from her. How very like the old days. When one must be constantly vigilant if one wished to discover what others knew.

_That was okay_, she thought. In her day she had been more than proficient at palace-level intrigue. If Tamara would not tell her that her son - _her_ son - was listed missing, then she would not set Tamara's heart to even the slightest whisper of rest by sharing with her that his status was verified as Prisoner of War. _Living _Prisoner of War.

Let the old biddy choke on her grasping, attempt-at-domineering-everyone ways. Olive was used to betrayal. Betrayed by the man she loved, who had not followed her to this country, as he had said he would. Betrayed - left - by her son, whose appetite for war had ever proven greater than his aptitude for love. Betrayed by her adopted country, this America, to whom she had sworn allegiance. This country of the United States now allied with _her _enemy, Stalin's Russia.

It all made her wonder if perhaps Germany was not so terribly bad in the end. After all, Alix had been a German. And before it all fell in, Alix had been easily a third of her world. A full third of the sphere that contained the things she loved.

Olive let her eye only momentarily slip away from Tamara, who had now fallen asleep in her chair, to where Zara laid out her three dollies on the braided rug like patients in a hospital, children ready to be tucked into bed.

"_Just give me something, to remember you by_," the radio sang, "_when you are far away from me_."

* * *

**ENGLAND - Lionheart Rooming House -**"The Queen informs me that you expect to be shipping out imm-imm-imm-imminently," stammered Ron Legg's tea-time guest. "Although, perhaps we are not meant to know - or speak of such things - so m-m-much."

"As I shared with Her Majesty, Sir, knowing that I am going is yet a far cry from knowing _where _I am to be sent. And even I know not when."

"And your boy, Mark? You have settled m-m-matters satisfactorily where he is concerned?"

Legg cast a glance away from his Sovereign toward the small secretary that served as the only desk space in his humble accommodations. Only that week he had received news in the post from his solicitor that the Earl of Huntingdon had indeed returned the papers appointing him guardian (in the event of death) to Legg's young orphaned nephew.

"It is good of you to inquire, Sir," he answered the King, gesturing to him with the unassuming, single plate of store-bought biscuits to offer him another. "I have full satisfaction on that count, I am happy to report."

"Exc-c-c-ellent," his guest announced. "But to the matter at hand. I was sent 'round, chiefly to see that before you shipped, you received this," he withdrew a long, folded sketchpad-sized paper from within his regally tailored suit coat. "Margaret is insistent that you have it."

Legg opened the tri-folded paper and could not, even in the presence of royalty, hold in a near-honking laugh. "That's me, then, is it, Sir? But she has me sitting her pony, _surely_. I never dwarfed a horse that much in the Private Guard."

"It is how she remembers you, she s-s-s-said," the King replied, a touch of whimsy in his own face at the ill-rendered proportion of Legg in comparison to his puny mount.

The King rose, signaling the end of the time he had managed to allot for this unusual outside-of-the-palace meeting. He extended his hand to Legg, who accepted it with his usual gusto for all things.

"B-b-b-be well," the man now known as George VI wished the man who had become a trusted ally.

"For King, and Country," Legg nodded. "For the Queen. And the Princesses."

"And the _People_," the King added, with gentle emphasis.

"And the People," Legg agreed.

* * *

**LONDON - HQ British Secret Intelligence Service -**Roger Stoker began his fourth attempt at writing the request to his nameless superior (known to him only by a series of designated numbers) asking that Clem Nighten be informed of the Nightwatch's report that Sir Edward, Lord Nighten, Clem's father, had died.

Naturally, one could not divulge to Clem (assuming his security clearance level did not encompass such knowledge) the nature of the information, and how it had been obtained. But surely, the Service at least owed it to the man to let him know that what was considered to be a reliable source had reported the elder statesman's death.

After all, beyond the personal reasons of mourning and dealing with such a loss, there were practical issues to face; the fact that Clem would then succeed his father to the hereditary title of Lord Nighten, as well as inherit the balance of his father's considerable wealth and estate.

Stoker could think of no good reason to keep the news from his brother-in-law, and in this fourth attempt at expressing himself on the topic he did not hesitate in saying so.

The news had come to him on that particular reel of tape. The tape that had been the night, of course, that had kept him on pins and needles for a good two weeks - before the next batch of tapes could be cleared and delivered to him for review. The night of the...he didn't know what to call it. The malfunction. The slip-up. The _the-Queen's-knickers'-what's-gone-wrong? _night. When, for thirty-two minutes past the broadcast's dependable sign-off, an instant of the same song replayed in what certainly seemed an unintentional loop.

It embarrassed him to admit it (not that he had anyone to admit it to), but he had had trouble sleeping well until those next tapes arrived, reassuring him the Nightwatch went on.

_You've become too caught up with this, old boy, _he told himself_. Too much bloody time on your hands waiting for Pellinore to be greenlit and shoved out of perpetual turn-around. You worry about a girl an Occupation away that you will never meet - even if Pellinore is a go - thinking of her as a friend, a touchstone - a compatriot_.

If Evelyn knew he spent his days in this cramped office space playing tapes of a girl broadcasting news and (usually Nazi-_verboten_) songs she would think him mad. Or unfaithful. But it wasn't like that.

He wasn't in love with the girl, with her voice. It was only that she was important. The only person on the Channel Islands able to speak to him. Able to communicate with the outside world. And she mattered. The loss of her - of the work she was doing would...he did not like to think of it.

He looked down again, to the notebook upon which he was writing, nearly to the point of the closing.

Perhaps he ought to try and find his shared secretary. She had a level of security clearance, after all. See if she might dictate his thoughts and work with him to formulate a better letter of request. Less emotional, perhaps. Less...frustrated.

He looked to the door (it did not take long to glance across such a narrow distance), then back to his desk. Oh, he would be here forever. Alone. Waiting. Vigilant and at the ready. A bloody Chinaman's terra cotta warrior.

But vigilance cannot be maintained indefinitely. Years hence they would find him, he did not doubt - like aging wine in a country house's grand cellar; dusty with age, embraced by cobwebs, stoppered and immobile on a rack.

And still waiting. _Waiting_.

**- END PART ONE -  
...TBC immediately in Part Two...of "Don't Give Out with Those Lips of Yours"**

* * *

_Part One Cast and Locations List_

Our Cast  
_Robert "Robin" Oxley, Viscount Huntingdon_...Robin of Locksley, Earl of Huntingdon, aka the outlaw Robin Hood  
_The Lady Marion Nighten_...Lady Marian of Knighton  
_Lieutenant, Herr Geis Gisbonnhoffer_...Sir Guy of Gisborne  
_Alderney Island Kommandant Vaiser_...Vaisey, Sheriff of Nottingham  
_Sir Edward Nighten, former Parliamentarian_...Sir Edward of Knighton, former Sheriff of Nottingham

_The rest of the "Saintly Six" -  
Mitch Bonchurch (born Mitch Miller), Navigation Officer_...Much  
_William "Wills" Reddy, Communications Officer_...Will Scarlet  
_Allen Dale, Reconnaissance and Acquisitions, alias Dale Allen, the Kommandant's driver_...Allan-A-Dale  
_Richard Royston, Explosives_...Royston "Roy" White  
_Iain "John" Johnson, Medic_...Little John Little

_Flight Commander Thomas Carter, aka Alexsei "Aliosha" Igorovich, Prince Komonoff_...Carter, a knight Templar serving in the King's private guard from S2 "Get Carter!" and S2 "We Are Robin Hood". (His dead brother's name was Thomas).  
_Underlieutenant Diefortner_...De Fourtnoy of S1 "Who Shot the Sheriff?" who _briefly_ served as the Sheriff's Master-At-Arms  
_Gypsy Boy Djak_...D'Jaq/Saffiya, Saracen slave/captive who joined Robin Hood's gang in S1 "Turk Flu"  
_Anya Grigorovna_...Annie, kitchen wench and (heaven help her) mother of Gisborne's son, Seth, of S1 "Parent Hood"  
_Dick Giddons_...Benedict Giddons, the Locksley flour thief who broke under torture and named Will and Luke Scarlet as his co-conspirators in S1 "Will You Tolerate This?"  
_Stephen "Blind" La Salle_...Stephen, the widowed blind architect and (seemingly hermit) teacher of S2 "Booby and the Beast". Meant to stand as a re-rendering of both that BBC series character _and_ the Hood myth's Friar Tuck (not the series' Tuck).  
_Eva Heindl_...Eve of Bonchurch, of S1 "A Thing or Two About Loyalty"  
_Tom Thatcher_...Tom-A-Dale, on-the-make brother of Allan-A-Dale, hanged erroneously for Robin Hood's man in S1 "Brothers in Arms". He claimed to be a roof thatcher.  
_(Current U.S. 5th Army Lieutenant Colonel) Fred Otto_...the Booby; Count Friedrich Bertrand Otto von Wittelsbach, of the German duchy of Bavaria, of S2 "Booby and the Beast"  
_Lord Merton_...Walter, Lord of Merton, noble conspirator and supporter of King Richard during Edward's plan to overthrow the Sheriff in S1 "A Clue: No". Prior to that, a regular attendee of the Council of Nobles  
_Clem Nighten_...Sir Clem of Knighton, an OC, Marian's older brother, as invented for my S2 finale (and going forward) Band-aid brand fanfic, "Death Would Be Simpler to Deal With"  
_Jodderick, Bailiff of Guernsey_...Joderic, bailiff of Nottingham in S1 "Who Shot the Sheriff?" [yes, Guernsey's highest civilian official even, to this day, wears the title, 'bailiff']  
_Roger Stoker, Intelligence officer previously assigned to the British 8th Army_...Roger of Stoke, knight loyal to King Richard, sent with an important letter by Robin, doomed at the word of Allan-A-Dale in S2 "The Angel of Death"  
_OberAdmiral Jan Prinzer, highest ranking officer of the German Occupation force trying to overthrow King George's (Britain & the Crown's) control of the Channel Islands_...Prince John, high-ranking member of the monarchy trying to overthrow King Richard's control of England, throughout the series  
_Mr. Thornton_...Thornton of Locksley, faithful servant and (presumed) life-long friend of Robin Hood first introduced in S1 "Will You Tolerate This?"  
_Matthew, attache to the Bailiff_...Matthew of Nettlestone, casualty of S1's "Who Shot the Sheriff?"  
_Mrs. Abby Rufford_...Abbess of Rufford, fake member of the clergy working to thwart the Sheriff and rob Nottingham (and England) of its taxes in S1 "The Tax Man Cometh".  
_Laurence McLellan_...Laurence McLellan, one-legged, doomed courier of a letter from the King, and the Sultan's best pigeon, Lardner, in S2 "Lardner's Ring". A man trying to deliver his message to the right house, but intercepted by the wrong person being at home there. It is over his dead body Robin so memorably proposes.  
_Louise La Salle_...Alice Little, first seen in S1 "Sheriff Got Your Tongue?", who loves fish and takes in sewing, and has a son who does not know his father, about whom his father does not know.  
_Joss Tyr/Operation Todt Officer Count Werner von Himmel_...The Fool of S2 "Lardner's Ring", fond of soothsaying and (at least when it is in his best interest) outlaws.  
_Elerinne Vaiser_...Eleri, of the necklace, who wishes to be married, and asks 'Lord' Gisborne first, before coming to her senses and having Robin perform the ceremony in S1 "Brothers In Arms".  
_Specialist Joseph_...Joseph of S2 "The Angel of Death", with a knack for hurting people (and a desire to eliminate 'undesirables' from the world, starting with Nottingham).  
_ReichKaptain Lamburg_...Lambert, of the black powder ledger, a man who discovers too late where his loyalties lie (and where his supposed friend's, Gisborne's, lie as well) in S1 "A Thing or Two About Loyalty".  
_Hilda Heindl_...Matilda the midwife of S2 "Ducking and Diving"  
_Daniel Heindl_...Daniel, hostage outlaw wannabe in the Sheriff's black diamond exchange of S2 "Child Hood".  
_Ginny Glasson_...Lady Glasson, to whose relative safety Annie and Seth were sent at the end of S1 "Parent Hood".  
_Naval Commander Ron Legg_...LeGrande [invert the name, 'Legg, Ron'] knight loyal to King Richard, dying in His service, a member of the King's Private Guard, who knows Robin and Much in S2 "Treasure of the Nation".  
_Mark Legg_...Mark, blonde outlaw wannabe of S2 "Child Hood".  
_Lucky George_...Lucky George, buyer of your peasant valuables and treasures so you can pay your taxes in S1 "Brothers In Arms".  
_Oberseer Jarl Derheim_...The Earl of Durham, unseen buyer of brides from the Church in S1 "Brothers In Arms".  
_Constable Dunne of Guernsey_...Treeton miner Dunne, Rowan's father in S1 "Turk Flu" who pays for his inciting the miners to strike with his life.

Our Locations  
_The Channel Island of Guernsey, and in particular the Barnsdale estate_...Knighton, Village and Hall (named so after Barnsdale Forest)  
_The Channel Island of Sark_...Sherwood Forest  
_The Channel Island of Alderney_...Nottingham  
_Kirk Leaves, the Earl of Huntingdon's English country home_...Locksley Village & Manor (named so for the series' oft-acknowledged safety of Kirklees Abbey)  
_Treeton Camp, Channel Island of Alderney_...Treeton Village and Mines, where D'Jaq was brought as slave labor in S1 "Turk Flu"  
_The Bertrand-Otto Stables and Farm of Nicholasville, Kentucky, USA, just outside of the acknowledged horse capital of the world, Lexington_...the German Duchy of Bavaria (named so for the Booby, 'Count Friedrich Bertrand Otto...'), but also meant (along with America) to stand in for the Holy Land/the Crusades, as this is where Marion goes to find glory (on the American Equestrian Circuit) and to prove herself (as series Robin - and yes, even Robin here - went for a soldier/knight)  
_Farm of Blind La Salle, Channel Island of Sark_...Outlaws' Camp  
_Ripley Convent School_...Ripley Convent, home of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in S2 "Get Carter!", where Marian tries (with Allan's helpful attacking of its Mother Superior) to convince Guy she is staying in the wake of Edward's death.  
_Lincoln Greene, the Nighten family English country estate_...Lincoln Green, in the legends, usually the specific color dye and weave of the concealing green cloth worn by Sherwood outlaws.  
_Grey Goose Gentlemen's Club of London, the Earl of Huntingdon's club_...no, not _THAT_ kind of club, named for the legend Robin Hood's usual 'grey goose shaft' - his arrows fletched with goose feathers.  
_The Tripp Club of London, Robin Oxley's club_...for The Trip to Jerusalem Inn, referenced as merely 'the Trip' in all seasons of the series, an actual place in actual Nottingham, now called, 'Ye Olde' Trip to Jerusalem Inn. Named after its claim to being the last stop for Crusaders before leaving town for Richard's holy war. [_Have you been there? Betcha Glorious Clio has..._]

_Other series place names_ have been substituted for inconsequential characters here and there, for example, the butlers Mr. Clun (Barnsdale), Ettlestone (Nighten Mayfair house) and Wadlowe (Kirk Leaves), Mrs. Trent of the NYC British Consulate (never seen, only referenced), Dr. Battley, the only physician on Sark (Battley Street in Nottingham being where the duplicitous Dr. Pitts is said by Thornton to now live in S1 "The Return of the King"), and Roger Stoker's mother-in-law Baroness Woodvale (a member of the Council of Nobles).  
_Other series words_ also appear in various forms...The Fool of S2 "Lardner's Ring" becomes 'Joss Tyr'/(Jester), Marion proves preternaturally adept with a horse (as does series Robin with the bow), 'Saracen's Beau'/A (re-curved) Saracen Bow. The horse's sire and dam are 'Swallow Den'/(Saladin) and 'Cordelia Anne'/(Coeur-de-Lion).  
Therefore, as series Robin gets his 'bow' (the superior expression of his particular talent) from the Crusades, so does this Marion get _her_ 'Beau' from the same two 'adversaries', if you will.  
Here, Gisborne gives up his family, as he does his illegitimate son by Annie (S1 _Parent Hood_), Seth, in the series' Sherwood.

Any character not mentioned specifically here in the cast list is fully OC.

A word about _Operation Pellinore_...of course this was not a 'real' British Commando raid of the Islands (the others mentioned all did occur, and in fact, even more were planned - but abandoned, including a large one meant to wrest them out of German control entirely). Nineteen-forty-three was a busy year for British Commandos on the islands. Operation Huckabuck occurred February 27-28th of that year, with Hardtack 7 putting in at Sark's Pt. Terrible in December.  
Pellinore is an Arthurian knight (his story varies slightly by which legend you might choose to privilege), but more importantly he is a king who has misplaced his kingdom; lost it and can no longer find his way back to it. As Robin has lost (through his faked death) his to-be-inherited earldom, and is stranded, unable to return to England (his kingdom) along with the rest of Unit 1192, _and_ as King George and the British Empire have lost the Channel Islands (their kingdom) to the Germans.  
[*This 'Pellinore' has no relation to _Lord of the Rings_' Battle of Pellenor Fields (as that novel had not yet been published at the time)].

*Please see the author's ending note on Story 1, "_Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree_", regarding historical and geographical content, and use of any unintentional anachronisms in this fictional work.

Oh, and thank you. For reading to the end. ;)


	30. Begin Part Two

_"I just got word from the guy who heard,  
from the guy next door to me.  
The girl he met just loves to pet,  
and it fits you to a 'T'"_

Time has passed since we last saw the seemingly-forgotten Roger Stoker in his cramped basement office at MI-6.

The year is now 1944, in the month of April. U.S. 5th Army Lieutenant Colonel Fred Otto has thus far managed to weather the dreadfully bloody and long-lasting siege of Italy's Monte Cassino unscathed. Well, mostly scathed. But still. It will not be until May 18th (in a siege that began in December) that the Allies will break through, and then advance onto the city of Rome by June fourth.

Throughout the early months of '44, it is the Russians who admirably (but at great price) have brought the principal pressure upon the German armies, the Russians who had for three months resisted savagely street by street, and house by house, finally overcoming their German attackers and taking back full possession of besieged Stalingrad on February second.

Allied bombers continue to hammer hard at Hitler's "Fortress Europe", and it has been decided that, rather than attempt invasion through the Pas de Calais region of France - directly opposite southern England - the highly, top-ranked security clearance planned attack will be set over the beaches of Normandy, to the east of the Cotentin peninsula, as the canny Germans have already heavily fortified the more logical and tactical landing in that Pas de Calais region.

Just as they have spent the lives and near-lives of countless slave laborers fortifying with concrete bunkers and the placement of landmines the Channel Islands, British Crown dependencies that Hitler is nearly fanatically obsessed with, feeling that with them he occupies part of Great Britain, ever-convinced that when the Reich's direct assault of Great Britain begins, it is from these humble islands that it will be launched.

His attention to and interest in the islands have distracted him, and lost him the further respect of more than one of his peers.

Such small dots of nothing, and so much energy expended upon them. Manpower, military might, munitions and armaments. But it is not only on _der Fuehrer_'s mind that the Channel Islands now come to bear. It is the Allies, too, who, smartly seeing them as a location for a potential rear-attack by the enemy during their secret-until-the-day landing assault are at making the necessary plans to blockade the small bailiwicks, cutting off both their non-combatants and oppressed prisoners, _and_ the Nazi overlords that occupy them. Very soon there will be no boats into, or out of the Islands. No planes without them running the risk of being immediately shot out of the sky. No further supplies from mainland France. No off-island communication. The deep privations experienced by regular, non-collaborating Island folk soon to be felt by the 'til-now high-living Germans stationed there.

Allied ships will sit and patrol, possibly within sight of the well-mined shores and beaches. The liberators, the good guys. Set to cause further pain and suffering. The Channel Islanders now twice scorned, twice let down. First, by their own Duke, the King of England, His Prime Minister and His Parliament. Soon, by the King's Own Royal Navy, at the behest of the Allied force meant to protect the Islands. Now where was the loyalty, where was the justice in that?

* * *

**NORTHERN ENGLAND - Kirk Leaves, Country Estate of Sir Robert, Earl of Huntingdon -** The Earl felt the peculiar warmth of the two small bodies to either side of him. Little Nan to his left, eight-year-old Perry to his right. Peculiar to him in its unintimidated intimacy. Peculiar that these two children would choose to partner him so at this time, this moment of grief and sadness rather than be out-of-doors with their school- and housemates.

He wondered to himself if _he_ would not rather be out-of-doors as well, avoiding the fresh memories the morning's unfortunately-timed doctor call had brought about.

The chapel at Kirk Leaves was neither ornate nor large in its size. But it was always neatly and respectfully maintained. And it was within the manor proper, not set aside as its own building. It held six truncated pews, five-feet in length, made of local timber, an altar consecrated in the 1600s, and some Italian Renaissance religious _objets d'art_ that Mrs. Oxley, the Countess Huntingdon, had acquired for the space while on their wedding trip those decades ago.

It was for Delia that the Earl had, for so many years, from time-to-time, frequented this holy nook. To reflect, to mourn, to...breathe in a place that spoke of the hope and promise of a one-day peace. A reconciliation.

Today he found himself trying very hard _not_ to think of his beloved Delia as his eyes could not look away from the tiny, immobile bundle placed in front of the altar, wrapped only in the manor's softest blankets, as no casket had yet been crafted for it.

Of course, when Delia had been brought to the Kirk Leaves' chapel, _their_ baby had accompanied her, lying as perfectly still as her mother, wrapped in Delia's arms. Neither to move again. Delia's eyes never to re-open, nevermore to twinkle and spark up at him.

He had never brought himself to name the child, as Delia had died without doing so. And without Delia he had found himself with little heart left to do much of anything.

Seeing this similar tiny bundle today his mind called to him that this child - its age, the age of its mother - might well have been that of his baby daughter's. Might well have been Delia's grandchild. Himself, today, perhaps a mourning grandfather.

He straightened and shook off the notion, but not without effort. "Nan, Perry," he whispered respectfully to the children in attendance with him. "Do go and find Mr. Wadlowe, and ask what news of Mrs. Nighten's husband coming up from London."

Like the good children they were, they set off to do just that.

* * *

Clem Nighten entered the chapel, the Earl having walked with him there now holding open one of the two doors for him to pass through, but clearly planning to leave him to his solitude once he did so.

He thought himself a coward. Surely Huntingdon thought him one as well, not to go directly to his wife's side, not race up the stairs and into the room as Walter Pidgeon might, sweep her into his arms and assure her all would soon be right.

"I was uncertain whom to notify," the Earl had told him in apology, as they exchanged muted greetings upon his arrival as the butler accepted his coat, hat and case.

"Yes," Clem had agreed, "Claire's parents have passed on. I should have thought to leave you her brother and sister-in-law's contact information."

The Earl had nodded, as though considering. "Knowing it might take you some time to manage the trains and so forth, I rang for Lady Nighten."

Clem was never sure what to think of the Earl's persistent use of his divorced mother's former married title, rather than the more-appropriate 'Lady Miranda'. Whether the Earl's mind simply refused to recall the change in her station, or whether it was simply his personal way of pretending that her divorcement from his closest of friends had not occurred.

"And so your mother is here, has been here - with her."

"Of course," Clem had heard himself echo hollowly. "That is good. Certainly that was the right thing."

"It was my own private physician in attendance," Nighten could tell the Earl meant this to assure him, "he has said that with rest and time she will pull through."

He had mumbled something vague though appropriate in reply.

* * *

And here he was in the chapel, hiding. Which was ridiculous. More delay? Was the overly long trip from Vauxhall Cross, with the necessary stop-over at the war rooms on King Charles Street not delay enough? What sort of man was he, who played at war day in day out - slept battle plans and took tea over top-secret tactical strategies - and yet was afraid to encounter his own wife in this, of all moments?

But Claire was...Claire was not strong. Any fortitude, any pluck she had ever displayed was mere artifice, a game, underneath of which she was so soft, so pliable, so...in need of sheltering. The loss of this child - on top of their other, earlier-in-the-carrying losses - would not shatter her like fine china, it would, more likely, dissolve her until she simply disappeared, drowned within herself.

She was not like his mother. But then, even his mother was no longer quite like herself. Something of her determination, her grit, seemed to have passed out of being at the prolonged separation from his father. It would be indiscernible, he did not doubt, to most. But _he_ could not look to her for strength in this moment. He knew her too well, would see the chinks and cracks showing in the present-day woman, the strain - things she never would have revealed in the past. And finding a lack of strength in her would disassemble him into something less, even, than a man.

No, in this, he was to be alone. And in his aloneness was also the need for culling strength, resilience from somewhere else, so that he might have something, _something_ to offer his wife, whom he could not delay attending upon forever.

He had never been of a particularly fervent religious bent, but he had never more regretted this lack until now. The space about him called out for supplication, for prayer and inward thoughts. His fist was all but grinding the back of the pew he had set it upon into sawdust.

It had not immediately, in all his tangled thoughts, occurred to him why the Earl had brought him here. But, now, as with clear eyes he surveyed the dark wood paneled chapel in which he was ensconced, a lightly pastel blanket - more at home on a bed than as an altar piece - caught his eye, and though something told him not to, his hand came away from the back of the pew, and he was propelled forward to view it.

Within the blanket, swathed like the Baby Jesus in a Christmas Pantomime, was a child. _Oh Lord_, he thought, _his child_. A tiny thing. Not so tiny as might not take breath, but tiny in the way of a newborn; precious in its miniature fingers, their transparent nails like a minnow's scales - an age of babies with which he had little experience.

He tried to recall the series of messages he had received on his way. Leaving Vauxhall (the message of Claire having gone into labour rendered as genteelly as possible): 'Come straightaway, Mrs. Nighten is in earnest.' At the war rooms, where he had no choice but to stop on his way out of London: 'baby girl delivered.'

And then, as he had been at switching trains further into traveling northward, he overheard a roving porter announcing that the telegraph station had a message for Clem Nighten - no, he could not recall its contents as clearly at the others. Not the wording, anyways, but it had informed him that his daughter, only recently come to earth, had returned to Heaven. And that, of course, he must still journey on to Kirk Leaves, no hope, no joy, nothing new to anticipate upon his arrival there. Only the same sadness, the same despair, now only deepened, inveterate.

As he stood by the altar (as though a man about to accept a Communion wafer), the pale skin of the baby was in a way so like his sister Marion's that he could not immediately believe the telegram had spoken truth. He reached for the child, never noticing that beyond the odd pheasant or other weekend-in-the-country catch one might acquire when shooting or riding, he had never touched anything dead.

The cloth of the blanket was soft against his skin, soft in comparison to the carved wood of the chapel, the austere pews. He marveled to see that the wee thing had perfectly formed eyelashes, brows like a light shading of pencil.

He let his finger trace a line on her face, imagined that her mouth pulled into a smile, a baby laugh at her father's gentle touch.

But of course there was no response.

He again found that he had no strength for this. The black curls about her head were too familiar. Too much a reminder of the one person whose strength, whose presence he so needed at this moment.

"Oh, Marion," he cried out, holding the child's body closer to him. "Oh, God! Tigs!" not sure to whom he directed his prayer. "I cannot do this. I - "

His great, athletic shoulders shook with weeping. All gregariousness that had ever been assigned to him in life had evaporated at that changing of trains like steam off a morning meadow. In his job, in his life, he had come to need - for nearly a decade now - to hold himself in at all times, to measure and parse out what was acceptable to be said, and to whom.

As he continued on in his lament to Marion, to God, in this he held himself in check no longer at all. His frame trembled with the release, his voice cracked and broke. He was a storm of despondency, no calm even where he stood within its very eye.

But in the wake of such a storm the child, his child, stirred not at all.

Nor ever would.

**...TBC...**


	31. Pirate Maps and Lost Treasure Found

**LONDON - HQ British Secret Intelligence Service - Basement Levels - **With monotonous step and rotely habitual actions, Roger Stoker approached and set to unlocking the frosted glass door of his meagerly appointed office space. He had been 'ashore' for so long now that Evelyn and the boys no longer seemed, even, to expect him to again be called upon to leave, and his usually sporadic family life had settled into a comfortable, if unforeseen, routine.

He marveled that the upper brass did not commit themselves - after his lengthy time back - to having his name painted upon the office door's glass.

_After all_, he thought, _doubtless I shall come into my pension from this room, never setting significant foot outside of it until that time. The Nightwatch and me, forever trapped in our proscribed spheres._

Oddly, today his well-worn key refused to turn as usual in the lock. It took his mind more than a moment to register that the reason for that was that the door was _already_ unlocked - within, the draftsman's lamp at his desk turned on.

With far less trepidation than he ought to have had, he walked into the office.

Before him was (if the size of the shadow the man cast was anything to go on) an absolute beast of a man, so large the modest (and only other) chair within the room could not contain his full bulk, forcing his knees up to nearly the height of his shoulders. However, such personal discomfort did not seem to distract this stranger much (if at all) from the star chart that he was raptly consulting, holding its back up to the bright bulb of the draftsman's lamp, which he had swung 'round to the front side of the desk.

This light flooded the chart's paper, coming from behind it, tiny pinprick holes designating the stars and their courses, which it sought to map.

"Bloody gorgeous, that," the hulk of humanity spoke, wonder, awe and pleasure easily spilling into his rough voice.

Stoker cleared his throat.

The lone spare chair gave groans and complainings as this unexpected visitor fought to expel himself from it. "Right," he nodded sharply to Roger. "Stoker, yes?"

Roger nodded back in reply, somewhere between terribly excited to see another person, and half-terrified of what that person may have arrived to say.

"Ron Legg," the man announced, producing his identity card, which displayed his security level clearance as well as his naval rank of Commander.

As Stoker handed the card back to him, Legg likewise handed over an inter-office communique which clearly stated that Roger was to brief this chap Legg on any and all things relevant to Operation Pellinore, and share this ridiculously small office space (and the already trebly-shared secretarial assistant and single telephone) with him.

"They _are_ beauties." Legg turned back to the desk and the myriad of sea-faring charts upon it (which Stoker had to assume Legg had brought with him, as they had been absent from the room the night before when he had locked up and left). "Everything - from the British Museum, even - on the Channel Islands. Some go back to the era of pirates - _and_ further."

"Pirates?" Stoker questioned. His own research was rather spotty on the subject of pirates.

"Followin' the Black Death, Island of Sark in particular in the 1600s was said to be a place of pirates, thieves, brigands...murderers and assassins." Legg announced these pejorative terms with great relish, as might have Robert Louis Stevenson himself. "Some of these charts are exquisite in their attention to the smallest of details. Mapping even the costal caves - " he pointed to one of them, "though doubtless they have altered some in their shapes and depths since the Seventeenth Century." Legg let out a soundless whistle as he marveled. "Few men can craft a star chart as crackin' good as a pirate living in constant fear of his hoard's discovery." At this, Legg had the presence of mind to pause and turn back to Stoker, appearing slightly sheepish as he offered, "I've had a lot of time on my hands these past few months waiting for Pellinore to take off."

Stoker was about to heartily commiserate with him when Legg withdrew a second paper and extended it, summing up its contents by saying, "you will be glad to know that HQ has agreed to inform Nighten of the report of his father's passing. 'S even been arranged for you to be present when he is told."

Roger's heart fell cold. _Oh. Awful timing, that_. All those requests, all those frustration-fueled missives to those nameless, faceless gents further up the food chain here. _Finally granted_. And could have come at no worse of a time. Claire and Clem's newborn child dead less than a week past. News of Sir Edward, such as it was, could not be more ill-timed, more precarious for that family.

"Also I am to inform you of your orders," Legg produced yet another paper," - the man's coat must hold a veritable filing cabinet (certainly by the size of it it well could) - "you are to be sent ashore and rendezvous with Unit 1192, while I, after ferrying you there, wait patiently off shore in the submarine for you to return with what you have been sent to collect: Oxley, to be exact - and all the information that he now carries."

Legg deliberately worked to catch Stoker's eye when he looked up from the letter. "We 'ship by end of week."

Roger could not believe how in the shortest tick of a clock a single moment could so swap the realness of his two worlds. Most days the Channel Islands, the Nightwatch and Unit 1192 consumed him, like a dark obsession - no one with which he could share them. And yet now here stood a man with whom he was _tasked_ with sharing them. He ought to feel elation. He had received his orders - and a timeline for departure. _Imminent departure_.

And now all he could feel was the pressure of his family's reality. The notion that Clem (and Claire) would receive further troubling news heaped upon his (and her) already grieving mind.

_Great Scott_, he needed to find paper and pen - and with all haste - and look for that blasted secretary. Get his one-third's (well, one-fourth's, now) use out of her. He _had_ to send off to that nameless superior with all dispatch, and put a stop to this impending catastrophic collision he had so unwittingly set into motion.

In the accomplishing of this, the Nightwatch, Unit 1192, Naval Commander Ron Legg, and the never-fading boyish lure of pirate-made maps would all simply have to wait.

* * *

**Northern ISLAND OF SARK - Nearby gardens of La Seigneurie - La Moinerie ruin -** Naturally, with the history of the island, one was not entirely unaccustomed to finding bits here and there of an unusual nature when working as one of the groundskeepers at the home of Sark's ruling Seigneur.

But here in the remains of a Sixth Century medieval monastery, of an early morning one, was more likely to find pottery shards, a button carved of bone - a curiously shaped bit of rock worn down by crude man-made tools. But a glittering stone - what was surely, even to an inexperienced eye, an emerald - of considerable size, and mounted into an impressive ring?

Philippe did not pause to even think about keeping such a found treasure. Off he sped with it (though it was still muddy from where it had been pressed into soft ground and - he assumed - lost) to the main house so that someone might be sent after Sark's lone Constable, Paxton (often to be found at the Dixcart of such a morning, his passion for gaming with the Germans stationed on the island well-known by all).

Whomever had lost this jeweled bauble - so large one nearly expected it to be paste and glass until one saw into its undeniably endless depths - would of a certain be missing it, looking for it.

_Turned one's mind, it did, imagining what the worth of such a ring might buy someone. A ring of such great price_.

_What_, Philippe wondered, shifting it in his hand to catch the light, _might it have cost its owner?_

* * *

**Southern SARK - Farm of Blind La Salle - **As Wills Reddy sat the watch this early morning, his mind had turned to windmills, and the inevitability of disappointment.

How well his plan, his retrofit of Sark's Le Moulin had gone. How successful. And yet how brief in its practical use. With the loss of Lady Marion's unfettered ability to walk the flat roofs of Barnsdale House on Guernsey and make use of the spyglass Robin had gifted her with to easily sight Le Moulin and the counterturning signal Wills had developed, it was infrequently utilized at present.

Wills made a mental note to himself to suggest locating a similarly elevated spot on the larger island to which Marion (now self-exiled from her estate home) might travel - perhaps at pre-set intervals - in order to check and see if the signal were operating. If she needed to exercise any particular caution, or needed, as speedily as possible, to get in touch with the gang.

She had begun to spin tales of the unit's exploits on the Nightwatch, no longer simply coded chatter to HQ (assuming - as one might on a good day - that _they_ were listening in), but plainly spoken tales to the Islanders who illegally listed to her programme. Jack the lad and his Merrie Men she called them. And if they waylaid a trio of Jerries for the ammunition they carried, or liberated a month's food rations by snatching it at Creux Harbor from under the Jerries' noses and redistributed it to those in need, the Islanders now heard about it.

Wills could not imagine how she had convinced Robin to allow her to do such, though he believed that she had gained some further degree of sway over their commanding officer since the time of her father's death, the deepening level of Oxley and Marion's relationship - particularly obvious to those at La Salle's themselves living in forced celibacy, removed from all possible pursuits of physical love (which they were, to a man, save Allen) - far from unnoticed by the unit.

No, he did not know the specifics of how she had done it, but here he agreed (whether Robin did or not) with Marion's gut instinct. It would cheer, and possibly embolden the people to know someone was fighting back against their oppressors. And (he could not say for sure, but suspected) that it irritated - and may even have frightened - some of the Jerries to know that not everyone on these Islands was ready to roll-over at their command.

Since Marion had been occasionally broadcasting their feats they had run into a surprisingly attuned and (sometimes ridiculously so) vigilant - rather, say, spooked - German army. Especially on dark nights, post-curfew. Even Allen had reported in that despite the fact that most Jerries had no way to listen to the Nightwatch, the news of Jack and his men had filtered through the Reich's ranks like a new/old bogeyman.

As the Guernsey Whichman taunted the enemy within - Islanders who dabbled (or dived) into collaboration - Jack and his men clearly existed to devil the enemy without.

* * *

At the sound of a disturbance upstairs in the farmhouse, Wills turned his focus away from the kitchen window where he had been at watching the road into La Salle's farm.

Carter was shouting in a tongue Wills could not identify. It was not Russian - over the past months he had heard enough of that to at least know when it was being spoken.

"Medic! Medic!" the downed RAF pilot began to cry in English, waking the house entire, then falling silent again before the interior echo of his own voice had yet died away.

**...TBC...**


	32. Thornton's Cottage FB London 1936

As a rule, Thomas Carter did not dream. Which was probably for the best. The things which were likely to haunt the nightmare edges of such a life as his were surely too strong to have been merely consigned, pleased to observe the borders of the dreamworld.

He slept soundly (often, it seemed to the others, effortlessly) and awoke with the fully-functional capacity of a man conscious for greater than a quarter of an hour. He could sleep anywhere, at anytime, and his mind seemed - of its own doing - during that sleep to continue on about its business discerning threat from non-threat; the loudest farm-based sounds disturbing him not at all, yet the slightest whisper of danger - of discovery or peril - and he was on his feet, as ready for a fight as a knight fully mailed and armored.

As a rule, the Gypsy slept the last hour or so of his allotted nighttime freedom, the time immediately before and just as the dawn was breaking, with his back to the back of the sleeping Thomas Carter. It was an arrangement none of the unit questioned, it having grown ever-more obvious over the past months the boy's attachment to the (still) largely taciturn pilot.

The need to bed-share (assuming one wished to sleep abed) ensured that nothing was thought of - and no inferences made - of the frequent occurrence, only, were either Carter or Djak needed at that hour, any among the unit knew to look in the upstairs bedroom, the one that was not La Salle's, and there they could be found.

Even Carter had come to expect the nearby warmth and grown-familiar scent of the sleeping Gypsy upon his morning wakings.

* * *

Carter came to himself shouting, screaming for a medic in what rudimentary Finnish he had learnt during his time in the Winter War, there. Though he did not immediately know why he screamed, it was but a moment before he saw the inciting cause: blood, on his hands. _Pedersan's blood_. There would be a spill of it on the snow at his feet, of course. Just as there had been. And by the time he had called for a medic it would be too late: the Soviets would be coming, having lapped and encircled the Finns' attachment, killed most of them, and be sweeping forward from the rear to collect prisoners: _Him_.

Too late, again to be prisoner.

And of the Soviets - his greatest enemy, the Russian people turned against their _gospodeen_s, their tsar, against themselves.

At this, his mind stuttered; but there was no snow on the ground here. In fact, he was in a house - in the recognizable, relative safety of La Salle's farmhouse. But still, Pedersan's blood upon his hands, in response to it his own live heart threatening to beat itself free of his ribs and burst forth out of his chest.

And he could...remember...things. Abandoning the bomber in mid-air, the treacherous jump into Channel Island water that not all had survived. He could remember those of his flight crew left alive and snatched, dripping from the Swinge, only to be shot point-blank as they stood abreast, beside him. Felled like goofy, insubstantial targets in an Atlantic City shooting gallery run by carnival barkers on the pier. He alone left standing, and that only at the twisted caprice of a German named Vaiser.

At that memory, and the inconsistency of Pedersan's blood appearing on his hands in the present, his mind returned him to his one rote, grounding task of recitation.

"_Twenty-two_;" he thought, "one card too many, dealer wins. _Six-five-four_; countdown to escape. _Eight thirty-two_;" the New Jersey house number to which he sent no letters. "_Thirty-six_;" his age when he had stopped counting the men he had personally killed. "And Zed, for Zara..." he willed his mind to recall the photograph Babushka had sent to him of her, now left behind in his RAF footlocker in England. Her hair white in the dual-tone image, her face eerily out of focus, as though she never stayed still long enough to be captured by the camera. "_Zed, for Zara_."

By the time Carter had arrived at Zara, though he was still a-tremble with hyper-vigilance, he was able to take in his surroundings more fully, able to look back to the bed he had vacated, see (and recognize) the Gypsy boy lying there, blood upon him, smearing upon the sheets. A mess, a wounding, certainly, but not enough to signal a hemorrhage, or imminent death.

The words now came to him in English, and he called for Johnson, who had slept indoors, and not out at the mines overnight. "Medic! Medic!"

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Mr. Thornton's Cottage -** Mrs. Robert Oxley, wife of the (for all intents and purposes deceased) Viscount Huntingdon - the Lady Marion Nighten what was - paced with antsy gait about the small stone cottage she had come to share with Mr. Thornton.

They were a strange match, she knew, Thornton and herself. But she had need of him. And she tried to work so that he would have need of her. She was happy, here. Happy with the little things this cottage could afford her. Mr. Thornton not only let her care for herself, he had actually fallen to teaching her how to do so. How to manage all those daily tasks that, during her life until now someone (often _many_ someones) had managed for her. And in doing so shortly she realized that not only was she in love, somehow, in the midst of war and disaster (even, of grief) - but that she was happy, in a way she had never yet fully been.

Happy to keep a modest house. Happy to cook meals (though even with Robin's assistance and generosity their provisions were often as scarce as other Islanders'), to sweep and mend. To tend to ordinary, run-of-the-mill chores like a person whose absence in doing such would be noted, would be missed. Happy to be of use.

The affection between her and Mr. Thornton, born long ago when she was but a child, remained understated, but in their time of being thrown together had grown exponentially.

The only fly in her ointment was, that, of course, she would much rather be keeping house for herself and Robin. But she could not simply absent herself from Guernsey, flee to Sark and La Salle's to be with Robin. If she did so, there would be no Nightwatch. If she did so - left Guernsey - Geis (and through him, other soldiers) would come looking for her. (And in finding her, doubtless find also the unit.)

Oh, she had hoped that he mightn't come looking. Had wished, and on occasion in the first weeks after the fire tried to sell herself on the idea that he would let be. And he had, for a time - whether because he could not locate her, or because he could not bring himself to face her, she did not know. Thornton had brought home island gossip that Barnsdale's Lieutenant had left directly after parting with her at the fire and not returned to the island for several weeks, concentrating on his duties at the Alderney camp.

No longer under Geis' protection, she had stayed put at Thornton's, never traveling into town, and other than town, finding she had no place else, really, to go. (Other than her nightly visits to the Nightwatch windmill.)

If there was a need to travel, Mr. Thornton gladly took it upon himself, bringing home what news and gossip he might have run across with him. The rest of the Nightwatch was rounded out by listening, when possible, to BBC radio, and choc-full of news visits by Robin, wherein he shared information between kisses, and exploits between caresses.

She had not seen a German soldier in three and a half weeks when, alone at the cottage, out-of-doors with their meager washing (soap for the task all but non-existent - but three changes of clothes between them), she looked up from the metal tub, her sleeves rolled to the elbow. She heard hooves near the north side of the cottage - nearest the little-used path that, in better and brighter days, friends would have walked to visit.

Uncertain what to expect, she held her position (Mr. Thornton at present gone fishing in a nearby stream). She heard a dismount, and the sound of a horse being led 'round the back of the cottage toward where she was.

Her heart froze in its beating when she recognized Geis as the unexpected visitor.

"Marion," he said, upon sighting her - if at all possible more stiffly than usual.

She would have expected his eyes to have trouble holding their gaze with hers, after all he had brought upon her head, but instead of glancing nervously about, anxious as a hare, they seemed to bore into her own. And she was certainly of no mind to timidly look away from him.

"I have...been looking to find you," he told her, as though this might prove something pleasant or comforting for her to know.

She said nothing, standing with the washtub and several feet of open grass between them.

He soldiered on. "I will not prove myself so foolish as to ask you to return to Barnsdale, nor to require you to do so." His voice modulated for a moment into a less-pleasant range, "though, certainly, I could." Still, the bore of his steady gaze. "You will come back when you are ready," he told her.

Her brain picked at her quietly, at this illogical meeting. He believed her married, black of heart and attempting to dupe him. He had burnt her property, brought about the cause of her father's death, made her watch as he cruelly killed one, and torched other animals she loved. Whyever would he want her back? Why not simply rape her here and have done with it? If that were what he wanted? It had been clear the night of the fire he thought her now a manipulative, faithless trollop.

She no longer thought of him as any version of a gentleman, no longer expected deferential treatment or patience from him. They were alone. Her 'just-in-case' gun was within the cottage. Other than the washboard inside the tub she had little with which to resist him. He could physically overpower her using only half his strength.

She wondered - _had he truly forgotten all that had passed so very poisonously between them? Had his mind simply re-ordered the world, abridging over that part? Or was it more like a play? Each with their part to learn? A play wherein he actually managed to woo her into consenting? A plot wherein he expected to see her willingly climb into his bed?_

Certainly, if he recalled burning the animal barn he now offered no apologies for it.

"I brought you this," he said, extending the reins of the saddled horse toward where she stood, still silent. Thinking she mistook his meaning, believing that he wished her to go for a ride with him, he re-spoke. "That is, the horse. It is for you. For you to have."

It was a borderline sorry-looking creature, but then, with food for the Islanders as scarce as it was, it was unlikely one could find a beast (one not destined for the cookpot - and the German cookpot at that) able to be kept in much better fettle.

She watched as he let the reins go limp when she did not step forward to take them, let them hang to the ground where the creature stood.

"I will come again," he said to her, to the great silence that was her, turning then to re-round the cottage, collect the mount he had ridden here, and depart.

As he retreated, riding at a walk through the close-grown forest about Mr. Thornton's cottage he found himself slightly shocked at their encounter. Had he not known he was looking for Lady Marion Nighten he might have given her up for some strange washerwoman altogether. The clothes she was wearing were far from pressed or spit-spot. The scarf about her head was faded cotton and tied as the older women of the local peasantry tended to wear them when about their chores.

He had caught sight of her forearms, bared for the task of washing. There were surprising (and unseemly, he thought) muscles forming there. Yes, most of all he could not believe what a difference the space of three weeks and some days and wrought in her physically. The pretty plumpness of her cheeks was fading, and if her clothing was any indication, the roundness of her figure was starting to deconstruct as well. He mulled it over, how she might be taking to her new, post-engagement-to-him life.

A half-cocked smirk threatened to glance across his face. Yes. Perhaps she would be back at Barnsdale, its warm meals, warm beds - sooner than even he might expect.

* * *

Marion waited until Geis' mount's hooves could be heard no more, nor its movement through the forest away from the cottage, and (before she could stop herself) dashed toward the poor creature he had given her, racing to its saddlebags in the hopes that victuals of some kind might reside there, the ever-present hunger of one under harsh Occupation causing one to care little where food might have come from. But though the well-fashioned leather bags looked plump from the outside, they were utterly bare within, and instead of Gisbonnhoffer supplying her with food for her table, he had, instead, gifted her (and Mr. Thornton) with an animal equally in need of something to eat.

* * *

Marion could not help but pacing the small space of the narrow cottage. Mr. Thornton had rather deliberately let her know this morning that he would not be back until before curfew. A generous offer, as he knew (as well as did she) that Robin was expected today - a rare enough treat for a wife who would have gladly had him in her company every day. And so the cottage was to be theirs alone for several long hours. She found herself hoping (despite the very primitive toilet she had managed to accomplish on herself) that perhaps he would have a bar of soap with him, and she might allow herself the luxury of both a bath and a wash of her hair. It was rare, since the night of the fire, for her to think of the luxuries of Barnsdale, but never had the cabinet of exotic and rich-smelling soaps and lotions in her private bath there called to her more than when she knew her husband was on his way for a visit.

Her eye caught on the horse from Gisbonnhoffer's tack stored now in one deep corner of the cottage. Today she would have to share with Robin the details of Geis' second visit in the last five months. Of course she would, it would not do for him to find out from someone else, though certainly it was a task toward which she looked not at all forward. She had only _just_ managed to keep him from pursuing Geis with murder in his eye following the German Lieutenant's discovery of her at Thornton's, and the gift of the horse.

As for the tack, it was a well-made saddle, she mused, the workmanship quite fine. In another time she knew she would have felt herself compelled to search out its craftsman, invest in other things he would have made. Commission a custom tack for her very own.

* * *

**1936 LONDON - the Nord Ingham Boarding Stables -** She knew it was unusual for her to insist on grooming her own mount - much less saddling her herself. The faces of the hired stablehands here at the upper crust boarding stable nearby the Park made that abundantly clear - even after all this time of her at having her own way. They never did seem to be able to get used to it. 'The Lady' Marion, dealing with horse sweat, with cumbersome leather saddles and girths, her own hands between teeth to coax the snaffle bit into proper place - the bit that it took to bring a highly-strung, never-bred filly like Greene's Sword to properly heed her touch.

But today it was the eyes of another young man that watched the Lady as she set to her work. He was half in the shadows of a stall nearby where she had Greene's Sword (as the stablemaster had helpfully informed him Lady Marion's horse was called) tied to iron rings in the wall by ropes from either side of her bridle.

_He_ had not been in London long, and only at the stables by the Park for twenty minutes or so, waiting for her to finish her afternoon ride and return. _She_ was outfitted in an impeccably tailored riding habit. As she rode astride rather than sidesaddle (only riding sidesaddle when accompanied by her father), her jodhpurs were flawless in their fit, her tall boots as shined as any general's. She smelled of horse and exertion, and a heretofore-undiscovered pheromone that was decidedly female in nature, brought on by hours spent at a pastime in which she took great pleasure. In short, for Marion, she smelt of happiness.

He, well, _he_ was not quite his usual self this day, his attire less spit-and-polish, less urbane than that to which he had made himself, as an adult, accustomed. Perhaps the soft wool and corduroy he had chosen for the day's outfit kept her from immediately sensing his presence, as the country-fied ensemble he wore had him styled as more a country squire about the business of his estate rather than London's most eligible bachelor better known for squiring young ladies about the town.

It was his never-quiet hands that saw him found out. Unable to keep them stilled they found coins in his jacket pocket and proceeded to tinker with them, making small jangling noises.

"Who's there?" Marion asked, into the shadows - thinking it some new stableboy, come to spy on the queer-minded noblewoman who tended her own mount.

When instead it was Robin Oxley, the Viscount Huntingdon, who stepped from the shadows, she found herself without reply for a half-second, during which she surmised that he a.) was not just now on his way home from an into-the-dawn fancy-dress party, nor b.) was he drunk.

"You are a curious thing to find, _here_," she said, her hands keeping at the work of grooming her horse.

"Am I?" he asked, showing no surprise at her chary welcome of him. "One might say, only, that I am rather late."

"Late?" she asked, eyes on Sword's mane, pretending she had not noticed (not contemplated on) two and a half months ago when he had sat in her father's study and announced he would 'make the date', and arrive back that very evening to take her out. He had then proceeded to disappear. And now claimed himself as late. "Whatever for?"

Neither a fool, nor a blind man - despite her trying to mask her clear disappointment with him - he rose to her challenge. "What is it is said of heaven? 'A thousand years there as a day? A day as a thousand years'?" His eyes looked up at her through his brows, where his chin was tucked as though chastened. "By that reckoning, Marion, I am some many thousand years late."

Something in that look made her catch her breath - though cautiously. "How do you do that?" she asked, now meeting his eyes, though guardedly.

"What's that?"

"Render such ridiculous over-the-top things with such sincerity? It is a talent for persuasion many a statesman would envy you." The second sentence had worn, perhaps, a bit too much of her (unsuccessfully) submerged disenchantment at his disappearance that morning from Mayfair.

Something in his chest, beneath his plum-colored waistcoat seemed to inflate at her insinuation. "And so you think I do not mean it? That there is some conniving insincerity in me? That I toy with you?" His tone lost some of its happy jesting. "I am not in the habit of saying things I do not mean. Were you a man, such words as yours -" clearly in disgust with himself for where their conversation began to head, he abruptly broke it off.

"Yes," she tried not to let his unexpectedly hard-felt reaction to her (perhaps undeserved) taunt touch at her too deeply. "Many men thanked you for your quick abscond from town. It was often said at many a party how very chivalrous it was of you to leave London so that Tish might remain here, rather than be sent away to get over the broken engagement." Well, she internally corrected, perhaps not at so very _many _parties. She, herself, had left soon after to holiday on the island with the family. And even when in London, she was not frequently _at_ parties.

Robin scoffed at her gossip. "I did not leave for Tish's sake. Though I daresay she would have far preferred a trip to some fashionable location on the Continent as reward for throwing me - and our relationship - over." Again, that coming-on hint of hardness in his voice. "You will know, of course - _as you did then_ - that we two were never engaged."

"No, of course," she backpedaled. "I mis-spoke. _Not_ engaged. Very well. Then for whose sake did you leave? Your own? To go cry into your cups? To dance the nights away with new - more diverting - girls? Or have you met someone?" She worked now to keep her voice light, teasing (though she was curious) - lest she reawaken the righteous temper he had let flare to her but moments ago.

"Yes," he agreed. "Matter of fact I _did_ meet someone..."

"I wish you all joy," Marion replied (perhaps a bit too rushed to sound genuine) as she removed the finishing cloth from her tack kit. It was at this moment that she felt within its negligible weight something else, rather heavier than simply a light cloth. Something knotted there. Without looking at Robin, she opened the cloth as much as she could to locate the knot - which had been tied around a (necessarily) small, horseshoe nail ring.

She smiled to herself, and involuntarily. She had not seen such a fanciful creation since she had been a child at their country home, Lincoln Greene, when the friendly village smithy there used to fashion her one from time to time as he was about shodding their horses and she, fascinated, had looked on.

Recalling Robin, and the stables she now stood within, she shook her head for a moment to clear it from the cobweb of unexpected memory.

"That is," she began again, looking up from the ring. "How did you know to find me here?"

He had a look on his face of intent interest - none of his considerable charisma and focus dimmed by any alcohol. She caught a twinkle in his eye as he moved it from the horseshoe nail ring to her face. He did not answer for a moment, then shrugged. "Mitch asked Cora."

That did not ring true. "I have not spoken to _Cora_ since...well, perhaps since forever," Marion shot him down.

"Very well." He did not mention (though it would have either been grimly or teasingly done _had_ he mentioned it) that when he arrived the stablehands had (due to his casual attire and request for the Lady Marion) taken him for the man of Geordie Wellington, a chap - he was informed by the same stablehands - that had on several occasions arrived to ride out with Marion in the past month. "I asked Clem," Robin confessed, "and he said I could find 'Tigs' here, at this time or thereabouts, any day of the week. _Whom_, by the by," he began a grin, "is Tigs?"

"Where has this come from?" she asked, raising the ring to the light and deflecting the question, not wishing to give him further reason to find fun in her.

"Well, I made it for you, if you must know," he said, and she could not miss the pleased-with-himself-ness about the corners of his eyes.

"And when have you been close enough to a forge or stable to find such a thing as a horseshoe nail - much less know how to go about crafting it into anything?" A grin was growing (despite her trying to stifle it) to match his own.

"Three months," he reminded her, "is a goodly enough time to half-apprentice to a smithy. In fact, to many a country laborer at work on a great estate. The things one might learn are truly...educational."

Here she let her suspicion show through, even through the grin. "Whyever would you do that?"

"'Twas a great lady, once - a powerful schoolmarm - like unto Diana herself, scolded me for my worldly waywardness, wondered if I oughtn't have a vocation of some kind."

Her face showed that he had nearly - _nearly_ - gob-smacked her. "And so you can shoe a horse?" she moved aside as though she half expected him to demonstrate such a skill here.

"Yes," he chuckled. "I can - though I can also report that I take no particular joy in the doing of it."

She stood, re-taking his measure for a moment. "And so you are back? From your country..._education_?"

He brought his hand up toward his heart in a sweeping gesture not unlike that a medieval knight might have invoked to illustrate earnestness toward his liege or lady. "To make good on my word to you, if nothing else."

"And how might you do that?" she asked, wondering how he could possibly answer, the knot in the cloth and the ring it bore clutched tightly in her hand as though she feared misplacing it.

"I've with me the best hamper that may be ordered at the Tripp, packed by the most-generous man on staff there, that may well hold the answer," he predicted, lifting a picnic hamper from the shadows to the height of his shoulder.

She could see a ground cloth and the neck of a bottle of wine peeking out from under its woven lid.

He willed himself _not_ to contemplate how many similar (though inferior, he was certain) hampers she might have shared with this chap Wellington in his absence.

"What? Now?" Marion asked him, looking 'round. "_Here_?" She had rather expected something more along the lines of a nightclub, at a very different hour, dancing, champagne, a floorshow. _Bonchurch_ - surely Bonchurch was always by his side at such times. She had expected Bonchurch. And time to primp - and then fret over the primping. A gift of flowers upon his arrival. A chat with her parents. A drink he would share, perhaps, with her father. Something structured. Something ordered and controlled - and (as he, himself was _not_) predictable.

"Now?" he repeated her question as to the suitability of the time. "I have not forgotten the powerful appetite a mind like yours carries in its stomach," he teased her. "And why _not_ here? I am told there is a nearby Park," he said, lightly sardonic, as they stood on the very obvious edges of it, "which could prove most pleasant."

"Only the two of us, then?" she asked, knowing what her father (and mother, and many others in their social circle) might say to such an impromptu and unchaperoned tryst (for surely that is the word they would use for just such an occasion).

"Of certain only the two of us," he assured her, his smile growing perilous - though quickening to her heart. "I've food for no one else, and what's more - whyever would we want, or _need_, further company? Have _you_ not thoughts enough on the pound versus the krone? On the present state of the Spanish nobility? Do you mean to suggest we must invite others along to be assured of truly stirring debate?"

His mouth stayed slightly open, as though his jesting had not entirely concluded, his tongue running along his teeth and gums within his mouth, occasionally becoming visible.

"Shall I not change?" she asked, looking down, thinking (only a small part of her) to return to Mayfair, and get changed, in the doing somewhat altering or appending the (to many) shocking proposal of an intimate picnic lunch in a mostly-wooded Park with a most notorious playboy.

"Change?" he echoed her question, a naughty smile of intense mischievousness blooming about his open mouth. "Good heavens, Marion. Why would you ever want to do that?"

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** The immediately prior 1936 Robin/Marion London flashback, which takes place at the Nighten's Mayfair townhouse, can be found in "Don't Go Walkin' Down Lover's Lane", Chapter 3. 


	33. Fatherless sons for sonless fathers

**A/N:** A slight edit was performed on the prior chapter 32 in order to clarify that although Geis located Marion at Mr. Thornton's a little over three weeks after the Barnsdale fire (and made her the gift of the horse), five months have now passed since Marion came to live at Thornton's.  
It should not be necessary to re-read that chapter, unless of course you would like to do so.

* * *

The last few months had proven uncommon good for the Kommandant's Islander driver, Dale Allen. He had benefited from an almost preternatural streak of good luck in both cards and dice (a streak which he must soon allow himself to break, lest the Jerries cease wishing to play with him), and he had benefited from the impatience of his employer, Vaiser. Tired of either having to task soldiers to collect Allen off Sark and bring him to Alderney (or whichever island the Kommandant was bound for that day), or wait for Allen to be fitted into the schedule of whatever attachments and patrols to Alderney were set to sail on transports on a particular day, the Kommandant had confiscated a lovely little launch he had found hidden in dry dock among one of the abandoned homes on Alderney. And gifted it to his driver, and with it, the necessary papers for Allen to move as freely about the bailiwick of islands - nearly - as his employer, providing the seas were not too choppy, as the launch was not a motorboat of great size, rather it had been built for speed and (had they known its long-absent owner) to impress the girls.

Its shiny wooden hull - varnished to a gloss as lovingly as Narcissus' polished mirror glass - turned many a head, even during the Occupation. The Kommandant, feeling his driver somehow represented him even when they were not together, liked it that way. The Kommandant's driver, never one to shy away from attention, and loving the dismissal of restraint where his movements were concerned, found he liked it that way as well.

And if he managed - on occasion - to ferry a workman or two between Sark and Guernsey - _for a price_ - well, certainly the Kommandant could not protest. Not if said workmen had all their necessary papers in order.

Such as today, the chappy he had brought along. Stonemason, as he recalled. Quiet fellow, really - not much for a chat on the trip to St. Peter Port. Allen chuckled to himself as he coiled down the ropes after docking, Robin already smoke in the wind on his way to wherever Marion was staying. Fortunately in his speed to join her he had not gone and left the necessary, corroborating cover of his masonry tools behind.

_Those two_, Allen thought to himself as he set foot to the Guernsey dock and went to collect the Kommandant's on-island car. _Thicker than man and wife anymore, since old Sir Edward's death. They'd be inseparable were but the world more like its old self._ He did not doubt Robin'd have Marion at the altar in under two hours' time, were a British victory declared.

As it was, they of course had to settle for stolen interludes of lovemaking (for he did not doubt for a moment this was what they were up to), as though each had a spouse they were cheating on. Robin's: the unit, their resistance work here. Marion's (for Allen knew the German Lieutenant's mind better than did others among the Saintly Six): still, after all that had passed between them, Geis.

* * *

He had the car, directing it down the mostly-deserted cobbles of the shopping street, toward Ginny Glasson's, where he was scheduled to collect Eleri Vaiser (at her father's wish) and drive her back to the Barnsdale estate where she remained quartered, though the chaperonage of Lady Marion was no longer available for the Kommandant to exploit (however it was unlikely there was any immediate way for his ex-wife to become apprised of such).

The only visible change to any observer was, that with the disappearance of Marion, Eleri had taken a whim (so the house staff and others believed), and ordered all of her things moved from what had been the former Lady Nighten's opulent suite and bath, and up two flights of stairs into the long-abandoned nursery, not used since Marion herself had been a child.

Occupying the portion of the top floor of the house still considered to be the family's living quarters, it was snugly adjacent to both servants' halls, with easy access to the women's. Little (if anything) would occur in the nursery of which the staff were not aware.

As Allen had been present at the time of her moving, he had been able to take note that the large open room of the nursery (a corner for tiny desks and the hearing of lessons, a corner with a child-sized round table for taking meals, and another corner for the piano) appeared (though of course he had never seen it before - at least not in good lighting) as it would have when the Nighten children were young. As though the master and mistress of the house had left it as is, either in a deep nostalgia for things past, or in a hopeful looking-forward, for things to come...such as the arrival of grandchildren.

Fortunately, Eleri's slender size did not over-tax the youth-sized mattresses on the beds in the adjoining bedroom, the nurse's Spartan adult bed long ago removed for use elsewhere in the house.

Stubbornly, she had refused, despite his several attempts, to tell him the root reason for her moving.

* * *

"Driver," she called to him today from the rear, passenger's seat of the car, their relationship constantly in flux, vacillating from all-too-familiar to distant, appropriate detachment.

Her hair had been done in marcelled waves by Ginny, smoothly and fetchingly along her face, as tide stroking along the sand, the length of it then pulled into knots and loops in the back - enough to drive a man wild trying to understand the complex system of plaiting. _Yes, Ginny Glasson certainly knew her trade_.

"Wot's that, Fraulein Vaiser?" Allen matched her in aloofness.

In the rear-view, he could see her bent over, studying a magazine of some kind, not even at trying to hide her keen interest in it.

It appeared to him to be an out-of-date fashion journal.

"What would you say is...the best way to please a man?" she asked.

Had he been eating something, he might have choked. Coughed at least, surely. Elerinne Vaiser asking how to please someone? Stop the presses. Drop the anchor. He made to answer her, finding it near impossible to keep his eyes to the road. (Fortunately, with so few permitted to drive on the island, he faced no other traffic with which to contend.) "I suppose...to be kind," he told her, thinking of some fantasy of a wifey at the ready with slippers, and bangers and mash kept warm and ready on the hotplate. "To be gentle, and sweet."

He saw her roll her eyes in exasperation at his answer and slap the pages of the magazine shut.

"No. Not like _that_!" she corrected him. "I mean...in a - a - a physical way." Her voice became steadier. "As a lover."

"Come now, wot have you got, there?" he asked her, his suspicion piqued, throwing one hand back to try and catch hold of the fashion glossy.

She tried to snatch it back from him, her face scowled in the effort, but even while driving he had managed to get a good hold of it, and brought it up to the front seat where he could see it, slowing the car's speed as a matter of caution.

"You give that back Mr. Allen," she demanded. "It's not yours!"

"And I daresay it's not yours either, Ellie," he reminded her.

With one hand, he opened the out-of-date fashion journal only to discover another booklet within - this one about half-size compared to the other, easily hidden among it. Upon seeing what it was, he pulled the car to the side of the road and engaged the brake, though he let the engine idle. Petrol, after all, was never in short supply for the Kommandant's man.

"How do you satisfy a man, '_Mister_' Driver, she asks," he said. "_Blimey_, Ellie. Where'd you find this bit o' sin? Surely not up in your nursery digs at Barnsdale?"

She sulked, looking as though she would make another grab for it back. But she told him. "No. It was at Ginny Glasson's. Just there, among the other magazines in the waiting area."

Allen whistled. "Some soldier must've wanted to spice-up his barbering trip's all I can say." He shook his head lightly. "My, but that'd catch a pretty penny from the right bloke," he referenced his immediate, gut-reaction: selling this somewhat dog-eared (and who knew what else done to - and with - it) pamphlet of black and white French erotica Eleri had managed to discover among the other out-of-date mags at Ginny Glasson's salon.

"It's not yours to sell!" Eleri replied rather righteously for someone at defending their rightful possession of a pictorial series of nude and near-nude men and women engaging in various forms of unacceptable public (and in some pictures, even private) behavior.

"Well it's hardly suitable reading for a girl such as yourself, now is it, Poppet?"

"I am _not_ a girl," she snipped at him defiantly, her just-groomed eyebrows coming together like a sharp pair of scissors. "Most men with a set of eyes in their head would know me for what I am: twenty years old, and by all standards a proper woman."

He could not hold back a snigger (though a muted one she did not likely mark, as he was facing the road and sitting with his back to her) at her use of 'proper'.

"Mark my words, Miss Eleri," he let her have her way in the matter of her maturity (if not in the matter of surrendering the pamphlet to her), "this here's not something you'd find in the possession of a 'proper' lady."

* * *

There were times when Elerinne Vaiser did not care for the way her father's driver spoke to her. When he chose to lord his 'worldly wisdom' over her - unfairly so. This, she felt, was just one of those times. Very well. She would not tell him that there _was_ a person who thought her _both_ proper and a woman. She would let him sniff it out for himself, if he were so very very clever as he thought he was. _She_ would not tell him her secret.

Though of course, it would have been helpful, really, had he agreed to answer her about the whole 'pleasuring' bit. Certainly he had evidenced no such particular prudery in regard to such matters with her before.

Now she had no idea where to go to get such an answer.

* * *

**SARK - La Salle's farm -** When Iain Johnson arrived to answer the cry for 'Medic' that had originated within La Salle's second upstairs bedroom, what he found would have been a tremendously confounding sight, had he not diagnosed the Gypsy 'boy' Djak with a case of impetigo some months ago. (At the same time also diagnosing the '_boy's_' complete lack of male genitalia.)

The gallowglass Carter was leaning far over the bed, which Djak still occupied a place upon, attempting to rouse him. Djak, at best, was responding sluggishly to his efforts, and when Carter stood away and the shadows brought on by his leaning diminished, it became easier to see the blood (though not in great amount, and in fact smear-dried) upon his palms, as well as that staining the bedding.

Johnson caught something in Carter's demeanor that was not that of the man's usually (almost) icy placidity, but he had no time to consider it before he was in the other man's sights.

Carter looked at the arrived medic, his bag for doctoring in tow, and at John's taking-in of his surroundings quickly surmised something of what was going on. "I must assume, Johnson, that due to the utter lack of surprise upon your hairy face, that this scene comes as no particular shock."

"How's that?" Johnson made the attempt to continue the sham, but he was never much good for playacting of any kind. "What's caused this, here? Wounded in his own bed? Djak!" he called, adding his urgency to Carter's previous attempts, "Djak!"

But the effort was hollow.

Carter stared him down.

"Right," John gave up the pretense. "Doesn't appear to be a quantity of blood that ought to be troubling. Not that we could very much have Battley in to examine our stowaway Gypsy..._girl_."

* * *

Djak's eyes came into focus, and she sat up in the bed her mind working slowly, as though something more than mere sleep, mere tiredness were holding her back. She felt achy and warm and...lethargic. As though she'd much rather curl up and fall back to sleep, than confront whatever else the world had to offer her today. It was a feeling quite counter to how she usually began her waking life.

"She'd best go wash herself, _and_ the sheeting," Carter said (though not directly to her), though she could not immediately place why. She wondered at his face, he did not look at all of himself. "And hang the sheets to dry within the house - no good for them to be seen on the line." He spoke the words somewhat clipped - as though he had a chill, his eyes half-haunted, similar (but not quite so wholly as then) to the days in which she had first known him at the Treeton camp.

"Has it come before, Lass?"

_Oh, Johnson was there too. How odd. The room was not made, really, for three - much less when one of them took up as much space as did the unit's oversized medic_.

She nearly asked 'what' aloud, before she spied the color of dried blood upon Carter's hands, and looked to the sheet below her, the blood upon her boy's trousers. In response to the sight of it, her own eyes grew large. Not at the possible gruesomeness of it, but rather at the shock that it had happened to her at all. She had long assumed her lack of womanly bleeding was the result of some of the bodily violence that had been visited upon her in the camps - or possibly a Godly judgment against things she had done, compromises she had been forced to make in her life, her path having diverged from the way of the Rom.

"No," she answered Johnson, shaking her head in the negative. "And I am," she paused to recall the numeral in English, "_twenty-two_ in years."

Johnson's face reacted to this. He and the lads had not thought their 'boy' Djak a day over seventeen. So, yet another preconceived notion smashed. Not a girl at all. A woman.

"I do not doubt 'twas the camps what kept you from it," he explained. "Poor nutrition, inhuman workload. Now that you've been with us a bit - this good Sark air, vittles on Stephen's table...it has made all the difference, and your body's comin' in to its own." He spoke the last part before he thought about it too closely. As his lips formed the words, though, up came a violent blush within and above his beard at the realization he was addressing a _woman_ about her _body_. To cover, he rushed on, "I shall ask Stephen for some rags we might tear for your -" he nearly stalled out, "bandagings."

Carter stepped toward the door, causing John to have to shift where he stood in the small amount of free space in the room.

"No need for that," he assured Johnson, still not addressing Djak face to face. (Indeed, still not looking at her.) "She will have long ago discovered where Madame La Salle kept hers." Despite the helpful vein of his comment (and the truth in it) it escaped him like a ghostly murmur more than that of a man simply speaking instructions.

As he descended the stairs and stalked into the kitchen on his way to the washhouse, he encountered Wills at the window, on watch. Before the younger man could ask after the earlier commotion, Carter leveled a near-killing gaze at him.

Ignorant of anything that had come to pass (beyond the earlier yelling that he had been able to hear), Wills felt his blood freeze in place, and found a half-second to wonder if Flight Commander Thomas Carter might've done more good on the front lines - the ability to render such a chilling stare surely wasted across the distances involved in aerial dogfights.

"I do not know what you've been playing at," Carter told him, forbiddingly. "I am not fool enough to think, after months of your confusing the feminine and masculine pronouns, that you did not know. If this has all been to take advantage of the girl..." He glowered. "Either way, you and Johnson are about to have your _bollocks_," he made use of the British term to drive his point home, "handed to you on a platter when your man Oxley finds out."

At that, he left in a thick cloud of unacted-upon menace.

Wills knew he could not hazard taking his eyes for long away from the road coming in to the farm. But he had never yet so dreaded the thought of sighting Robin coming down the lane.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Heindl Cottage -** Mitch was on his way back the short distance from the cow shed (a sort of half-lean-to alongside the chicken coop) to the cottage, from where he had finished the early-morning milking of the Heindl cow.

He stopped short before entering the cottage, seeing the shadow of a tall man, dark along the opposite wall of the window, next to the familiar shadow of Eva's.

For a moment he had convinced himself it was the occasional Jerry that showed up to check on him. Always unannounced, always swift and to-business, but always, dependably, they came. Came to make sure he had not run-off or attempted escape.

And so, with such a visit, Eva was required to present him for their inspection. He had seen, as they left, that (what he supposed were) Reichmarks were handed to her in a small wallet. For the keeping of him, he knew - this farm not enough to support the family already attached to it, much less the addition of the needs of a full-grown man. Between what it appeared Eva earned in the town (she helped keep the town pub, Hilda had told him) and this Jerry dole on account of Eva keeping him as a prisoner, the Heindl family only just got by.

Any excess monies, of necessity, went toward Eva. (Though she never let the others suffer in the doing of it.) For the outfitting and grooming of her - it being (naturally) harder to make money serving at the bar for ugly, or slovenly girls.

* * *

Mitch exhaled. Upon closer inspection, the shadow was Daniel's, Eva's younger brother's. Relief flooded him. Though the soldiers sent to check on his out-of-prison billet had never enacted violence of any kind upon him, he could not contain the skittishness that innately gripped him when he found himself in their company unarmed.

His discovery gave him a moment to muse on how Daniel had grown in the past few months. He was no longer quite the knobby-kneed still-a-lad of sixteen he had been when Mitch had first been remanded here. He was seventeen now, broader of chest, taller of frame, with something of whiskers threatening to sprout along his jaw.

In thinking of the boy's recent growth-spurt, he found himself unable to do so without a personal feeling of pride. Satisfaction in this boy who had become his friend.

He stooped to re-pick up the milk pail and proceed into the cottage, just as Daniel was ducking out of it, giving Mitch the particular wave the deaf boy reserved for the most special of his few compatriots.

"I want to thank you, _Monsieur_ Miller," Eva began as Mitch passed through the low doorframe.

"Thank me?" Mitch asked, seeing that she was already at the task of getting ready so that she might go out this day. She had worn a scarf to sleep in over her newly-set (done in the town) hair. She was now at heating an iron to press one of her prettiest frocks: a pattern of pert yellow lemons still hanging from their branches covering its cloth, from shoulder to hem.

"Certainly, thank you. Daniel is a different boy since you came to us. More open, less brooding. It is hard for a young man, I think," she offered, "without a father."

Mitch caught her darting her eyes over to 'the baby', now awake in the far corner of the cottage. Though the entire family was given to calling the lad such, he was actually a strong little boy of four, whose Christian name (though it was not much used) was Seth.

"And harder still," she continued, not realizing that he had seen her concern for Seth also in that moment - concern for _his_ future. "...with his lack of good hearing. You have almost outpaced me, Daniel says," she smiled, "with your quick learning of his sign language."

Mitch smiled. Though Daniel used no established method of signs (or at least none that Mitch knew of) and sometimes even grunts to communicate, he had managed - especially with the lack of other interaction available to him here, no books, no newspapers, no playing cards, even - certainly no wireless - to pick up the young man's personal code quite effortlessly.

But here came Seth, ready for breakfast - and always ready to disrupt a conversation by attempting to have one of his own.

"_Mere_," he called to Eva, "_mere_! Please, I want to eat?" Eva flashed a look up at Mitch, as if to ask forgiveness for the interruption, and moved to the cookstove to portion out Seth his morning's porridge.

Momentarily she returned, as always a smile on her lips for him, and kindness in her eye.

"You are going to town today," Mitch said, though it was neither a question nor a statement that required an answer.

"Do you miss your family?" she asked him, trying to deflect his mind from the town, from escape or sneaking about beyond the boundaries of their patch. Asking about his family was perhaps not the cleverest attempt at distraction.

"My family?" Mitch asked, thoughts of his mother so (necessarily) submerged at this point that her face did not even pop into his head. Rather, he saw Robin's face. And that certain look in Allen's eye right before he was going to take the game _and_ rubber from you. He saw the brine-hardened hands of Roy, those hard-won, protective calluses from his years sailing. Immediately he knew he had to steer them onto another tack.

"Seth is a lovely boy," he told her.

"Yes," Eva agreed, though perhaps hesitantly. "He, he sometimes confuses me with Mother." She tried to explain the child's having just called her, '_mere_'. Hurriedly she added, "he does so with my sisters sometimes as well. I've heard it."

Rather suddenly, Mitch found his mind becoming quite insightful where the boy Seth was concerned.

"No," he shook his head slowly in disagreement with her. "I do not think that he does. In fact," and here he dared to hold Eva's gaze as steadily as ever he had, "I do not think he is confused at all."

If the interior of a hovel, all of its three windows open to the outside, could grow quiet (the birds and other countryside noises do the same), so did the Heindl cottage grow in that long, long moment.

Eva looked at Mitch, smart enough to lift the heavy iron off her frock lest it burn.

Mitch looked at Eva, at the way her neck seemed to perfectly meet with her head just behind her ear. At the way that Eva, whom it was often said took after her father - and Hilda (of whom it was said among the family that Eva resembled very little) neither one seemed to have contributed one iota to young Seth's physical appearance. The boy's hair was dark, and nearly curly. His skin tended toward pale, with not a freckle on it, and his eyes (especially when he was about to cry in an attempt to get his way) were so large and blue as to be almost (as at such times) disconcerting.

He looked nothing of the Heindls Eva was said to resemble. And nothing (so it would seem) of the family that gave the world mad, batty Hilda.

"Perhaps he is not," Eva confessed, letting her head slightly bow with the admission that Seth, in fact _her_ son, was not at all confused about his proper parentage.

Before Mitch could answer (he _had_ no answer for this unexpected news, actually), she jerked her chin back up. "Does it matter?" she asked him, almost beseechingly, "does it matter if he is not?"

Her hands were each half-clenched atop her ironing. Without lifting either off the ironing, Mitch cupped his hand atop one of hers.

"No," he told her, his smile slowly reassuring, and entirely genuine. "Certainly it does not. Not to me."

**...TBC...**


	34. GeisMan Cometh FB Rooftops of London

**Nearby Barnsdale and Mr. Thornton's Cottage -** Robin Oxley chuckled to himself as he stowed his (next-to useless to his unskilled hands) masonry kit of tools among a by-now well-known copse of trees midway between Barnsdale House and Thornton's small patch and cottage.

_It was the best of times_, he thought. _It was the worst of times_.

_Marion Nighten now Marion Oxley. Finally, and evermore. And yet...Nazis in charge, the world surrounding Marion and him (both immediately, and the world at large) on the frightening cusp of sick, twisted domination by Germany's thousand-year Reich._

_Marion, his family_. He snickered, pleased with himself. When he had first landed here, shipwrecked, he was Robinson Crusoe (at least he thought of himself as such), shipwrecked, alone, abandoned, left to find his own way, the unit his only hope, his Friday.

Perhaps, in many ways he _had_ been Robinson Crusoe, washed ashore upon the wreckage of his worthless earlier life, a casualty of privilege without responsibility, of his understanding (sooner, than perhaps did his peers) the meaninglessness of his own existence, the lack of effect he might have upon the world around him. Noblesse, without the authority, even, to practice at oblige.

Yet here he was, stripped of all he had come to know and depend upon, rebuilding himself, becoming instead, surprisingly, _Swiss Family Robinson_. For surely he had found his family; the unit, but also La Salle, the Gypsy boy Djak, dependable Thornton, and of course, always at the center, Marion.

* * *

Nearly within range of the well-hidden and grown-secluded cottage, he was closer to the Barnsdale estate - and even to its house - than might be expected. From here, above the treeline and across the distance of the middleground (obscured by the trees of the small wood), he could even glimpse snatches of the top story of the estate's house, and more so of its flat-style roof.

He allowed himself a moment of speculation. _What would life be for him, with Marion still at Barnsdale? Her 'wedding' growing ever-nearer? Her person rarely able to be found alone, her guard unable to be dropped? _

'Twould be less of a marriage that they two were able, even now, to delight in. 'Twould be skulking about like thieves in the dark of night - denied, even, the moment of relaxation and intimacy afforded one by falling asleep (no longer on watch, no longer in fear of imminent discovery) in his lover's arms. Then, were Marion yet at Barnsdale, the subject of whether they might even now _be_ married looked more and more of an unattainable pipe dream.

Steps away from the narrow break in the trees that opened out on Thornton's, he considered Barnsdale's roof, considered the disappointing loss of Marion's easy access to it where the use of _Le Moulin_ as a signal was concerned. How that roof had, as had a Nighten roof in times past, done him certain favors.

* * *

**London's West End, 1936 - Mayfair - Edward, Lord Nighten's Georgian town house - the roof -** The night had enough stars to preclude the need for light from even the slimmest of tapers. The earliest touch of a London autumn in the breeze wafted along above the tony town homes of those many among the well-established aristocrats whose lives (and tastes) favored this reserved, revered, part of the city.

It was something of a different view from up here: even Lady Nighten let be her own roof, trusting it to the chimney sweeps and other workmen the household staff engaged to maintain the top of the town house satisfactorily.

He had found Clem's man, Percival, agreeable (though not overly-happily so) to helping him carry the gramophone and several records up the stair as it narrowed and passed through the servants' quarters, and then let out onto the roof. The blanket (for sitting, stargazing or spooning - as the evening - and Marion - provided the opportunity) he did not further tax Percival's scruples with fetching. He supplied it himself.

Robin Oxley thought of the time as evening - though, with most things Marion it was, rather, late. So late one might choose, instead, to call it early.

Her heart had beaten so thumpingly in his leading her out of the library and up the stair, past bedrooms of her sleeping parents and her brother - then, one flight further up, of the staff - he could feel her pulse in the thumb of her hand where it held to his.

Pleased, he smiled into the darkness before them at her game-ness in letting him lead her on so. Obviously she suspected that she was most likely being taken somewhere for dealings quite lurid. And yet she kept faith with him, never pulling away, nor letting go his hand - nor starting into a scolding before her suspicions were confirmed.

As on many a night when he showed up unannounced while she was at one of her speech vettings, she was done-up in a set of Clem's silk pajamas (Robin wondered - did old Clem ever get the use of them?), dressing gown on top, and bare of foot. As she had not slept, her hair showed no such tousling, and remained as prettily coiffed as it (doubtless) had been when she went down, earlier in the night, to the family at dinner.

He could almost smell adventure in the moment as he pushed open the door to the roof, and pulled her out into the night beyond. At this level, a night without eyes of any kind, much less prying ones.

He knew she felt close enough to her own family, her own world, below, to feel somewhat safe from him - from his (though he would never acknowledge - nor buy into - it) semi-scandalous reputation. She was but steps away from where she might raise the alarm. And yet she was worlds away from the expectations and strictures that lived below- (and above-) stairs.

In future he would kick himself for not being able to recall (had he even been able to note it then, at the time?) the song that had been playing as they danced, keeping to the blanket, due to his usually dependable foresight's proving somewhat dim in the matter of her bare feet's comfort in regard to the rooftop's unwelcoming surface.

Starry nights afterward - particularly after she had sailed for America and he had taken up with His Majesty's Army - he would lie on his back, watching the heavens, thinking of roofs and wishing (sometimes fooling himself into thinking that) he could recall, if not the words, the song's tune. As though that melody might re-conjure that moment for him, that feeling of delicious inevitability. That instance when he had looked down to her and said, "Marion, I'm going to kiss you now."

And she had jerked sharply away from his chest, where her head had been resting in the dance hold, her eyes for a moment filling with ferocity in that light.

"What sort do you think I am that you need to cable me of such an intent?" she had bit at him, appalled, and about to re-accuse him of treating her as someone far more timid and retiring than she really was.

"_Clearly_," he set to explaining, bemused, not releasing her from the hold - though stopping in his dancing, "I was only giving you fair warning so that you might not dive again, headlong, into quarrelling or debating. But as it is far too late for that, and the moment nearly spoilt..." His tone held no reprimand, though, as he brought his lips to hers (still open and milliseconds away from protesting at him further).

It was such a light kiss, such a perfectly formed and executed kiss. One might call it 'textbook', but only if one were at teaching the Classics.

As he pulled away, even before her eyes opened, he knew women well enough (for in such a moment, even Marion was not so different from her fellow sisters) to see that it had stirred within her an hunger for more. More of the same, and...more along the continuum of intimacy.

Certainly he could have pursued it, could have (with quite little effort) nudged his way toward taking more without fear of going beyond any bounds in that instant that she any longer wished (or planned) to maintain.

But he did not.

He had decided that he would let it stand: their first kiss, just that. One, single, flawless kiss. There was no need to borrow from tomorrow to satisfy himself today. With Marion there would be tomorrows. He would see to it she would be the most-kissed woman in all of London - in all the Kingdom.

Tonight? Tonight was for the stars, for dancing and embraces, and bare feet on blankets, and that song...that blasted, ridiculous, unmemorable song.

* * *

**SARK - La Salle's Washhouse -** Carter was disappointed to realize that, despite the incident with the blood being logically explained, he still struggled somewhat to keep himself upright, to regain anything of calm. He washed his face in the bracingly cool water again, his hands already well-scrubbed of Djak's blood.

The memories of Pedersen - of impending capture - were not even like that, like memories should be. Rather, they were fears, as ever-present, as wholly consuming as any fear (if intense enough) might be. They simply did not exist in the past. They were as present as his blinking eyelid, as the Jersey cow's audible protests coming from the barn that she was now past needing milked.

There came a knock at the latched door, and though he knew whom it must be, he went to answer it. It had turned into the time of day, after all, when an escaped prisoner (and one so clearly obvious, as was the Gypsy) could not afford to risk being out and about where they might (though the chance was slim) be seen.

He unlatched the door and she walked inside. Almost immediately, with obvious determination, he stepped out to the other side of the doorframe, into the barnyard, though he did not pull the door to behind him.

* * *

**1944 - February -** "How do you bloody do that?" Reddy had asked him following a lesson with Djak.

"Do what?" Carter asked the younger man, not getting his meaning.

"You know - _know_ what he's thinking." Reddy was obviously expecting some sort of directive to be shared that might aid his own communication with the boy.

Carter incrementally shrugged. "I _don't_ know what he's thinking."

"You don't?"

"I simply assume he _is_ thinking," he looked into the querying eyes of the other man. "Just because a person doesn't speak the dominant language, or doesn't express himself in it well, doesn't mean he's an idiot - or some sort of mascot or pet. Djak's a quick study. He's good at following orders, and as far as I can see he has more than earned his way in here with the rest of us - enlisted or no. That's all. Just acknowledge him as an intelligent human being - with a capacity for wisdom. Don't waste your already lackluster brain power," and here, had Carter been someone else he might've attempted to tousle Wills' hair, "trying to read his mind. That's what a Gypsy _fortuneteller_'s for."

"Right," Wills agreed slowly. "But you have something between you. I don't know what it is - how to name it, but there _is_ a connection."

"Hmm," Carter dismissed Reddy's moment of insight. (For certainly he, himself, saw no such thing at work.) "Then ask the boy - when your vocabulary's grown broad enough. See how he answers."

* * *

"You are angry with me," she, Djak, said, her eyes asking six other questions Carter could not seem to translate.

The morning sun fell into the washhouse doorway, highlighting the Gypsy, the slant of it along Carter's back warming him with its ray. He found he did not know where to begin, and that, rather, he would prefer not to experience this conversation whatsoever.

He had never thought of himself as being any good at explaning things. "It is only that I do not see how, when you knew you might be safe here - you knew that I would protect you from the others, if need be - that you did not tell the truth." He watched her closely to assure himself that she had not also kept possible infringements to her dignity by others in the unit from him.

"The truth?" she asked, shaking her head and lifting her brows. "I never said I was a boy. It was all of you that assumed it."

"And at the camp? What of then?" he asked, curiously. "How did you manage it?"

"I had a brother," she said, her eyes for just a moment flitting away from his. "My twin, Djakob. When he was killed - I will not say when he died - I took his clothes, and took to living with the men."

She thought of Djakob, of his death. Of how it had come about after years of privation and violence by their German captors. Thought of how it was her face he wore that day - and how now it was his she saw every time she encountered a mirror. "Men were allowed jobs around the camp, making it easier to attempt escape."

So, a clever, unplanned switch. He would expect no less of Djak - of _her_. "And the other men in your barracks? Were they your countrymen? Your people? And they protected you from being found out?"

"No." It was a wall of a word. A near-impasse. "They treated me like their _" and here she spoke a word he had to assume was Romany, though the sound of her voice as she said it caused him to need no translation. "And so they hid my secret for _that_ purpose. For two and a half years."

The crows' feet grown about the corners of his eyes contracted at the news. "And so your plan betrayed you, instead of protecting you?"

But she disputed his conclusion. Her shoulders straightened, her jaw re-set. "I am here, am I not? I was given the job of emptying your bucket, was I not? I befriended Anya Grigorovna, did I not? And helped to engineer your escape. I am free now of the camp, am I not?"

"At such a cost," he said, not a question, not an accusation. Only, an acknowledgment.

"Thomas Carter. You would have done the same. If it were to mean escape. I saw your eyes. I see them still. You would have done anything."

He wanted to be able to say (as surely an humane person might), '_yes. I would have done the same. But I would not have you put yourself at risk so_.' But he could not. He knew too well that anything - that whatever - it took to escape captivity he would do. Had done. And he would neither judge nor mourn another having done the same.

"Is _this_ why you are angry with me?" she asked him, trying to understand his frame of mind, and in doing so, coming at the question from her own, Rom-shaped perceptions. "With me, as a woman? That I am despoiled? That I am unclean - though I did not imagine it would be so - at my own hands?"

Carter shook his head in vigorous disagreement.

She looked at him, still not puzzling him out.

He looked at Djak - at her - now, of course, wondering that he had not discovered it earlier, her true gender seeming quite obvious today.

"What are you called?"

Her chin resettled from her emotion-gripped state, and she spoke the word she had not heard, nor said aloud since the death of her brother. "Seraina."

"And so that is your signature in La Salle's buried ledger."

She nodded.

"You cannot sleep a bed with me anymore," he said.

"Why?" she asked, hurt by his turning her away, by the disquiet behind his eyes. "I have not changed. _You_ have not changed."

"But you have," he dissented. "You are Seraina again, no matter if anyone goes forward calling you by that. The woman Seraina is not to be treated, nor to treat things, like her brother Djak." He thought of his younger life, of the deference accorded females. The need to ask permission for the smallest thing in their presence: for a man to light a cigar or cigarette. The standard of behavior with a woman was simply...different. More civilized. More genteel. She was not Viola, and he knew himself better than to think he might be (or even aspire to) Orsino.

"Do you expect me to then take over all the cook chores? To wear frocks, and insist the lads open all doors for me?"

"_You_ know, Seraina," he tried out all three syllables of the new name, "better than do I - than do the others - that there are separations in life: keeping the clean from the unclean, the Rom from the outsiders, the pure and holy from the base. A woman is not a man - nor a boy. A set of trousers does not change that. Women and men do not lightly share beds - no matter that they may have done so before - that they may have impurity in their earlier histories."

She heard him as he spoke, acknowledged the truth in his logic. Were she with her people, experiencing her womanly bleeding, she would not even be permitted into the presence of a man. As she spoke to affirm what he had reasoned out, she could already feel herself begin to mourn what they two had shared, and to fear if she were set to encounter similar responses from the other lads.

"Women and men do not simply partner each other as closest friends. No," she agreed - she had to agree, "you are right." But she found, to her surprise, something inside her wanting to ask, then, if there mightn't be another direction in which they could steer their tight-knit relationship. She did not wish to lose it.

But she knew him too well, knew the callus of his heart (though slowly these past months at sloughing off) was not tender in such a way - perhaps would never be so.

"But we are not strangers," she asked (more like declaring it), needing him to reaffirm their connection. To give her something before she must close the washhouse door on him and clean up for what he had so clearly outlined as her new life.

"No," Carter agreed, mildly. "Not strangers. But no longer bedfellows." He shook his head with the heaviness of sadness, of melancholy for Djak, the Gypsy boy he had lost. "No longer mates."

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Mr. Thornton's -** She had been to have her hair done. It was the first thing his mind took note of. Not that he had ever minded (and in fact, he had grown a bit fond of) the scarves she had found of the late Mrs. Thornton's that she had learned to wrap about her head as the older local married women did. She had also taken to wearing one of Thornton's wife's house frocks. It was ill-fitting, and Marion - though rather expert at purposeless needlepoint - had yet to get the hang of tailoring clothes.

He felt a half-moment of guilt that her hair having been styled should give him such a charge, such a rush upon seeing her, but he could not deny that it did. And not entirely for himself.

He was no fool to the fact that her circumstances here (all that he could offer her, and that - not even of his own making, but of Mr. Thornton's) were starkly contrasted to those to which she was accustomed. He knew the fairer sex well enough to know that even those reconciled to the most austere day-to-day life enjoyed times of being pampered.

The eagerness of the smile she gave him as he walked through the cottage's wooden door could not fail to bring one to his own face. And like that, that blasted, un-recallable song from eight years ago popped right into his head, needle set to the groove. "_My story is much too sad to be told/But practically everything leaves me totally cold./The only exception I know is the case/When I'm out on a quiet street/Fighting vainly the old ennui/And I suddenly turn and see, your fabulous face_." He smelled the scent in her hair as he double-stepped to cross the room faster to her, catching her into his arms, having torn his jacket from his shoulders and chest, throwing it aside before reaching the half-way mark.

"_I get no kicks from champagne./Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all/So tell me, why should it be true?/That I get a kick out of you?_"

* * *

Robin was so distracted over recalling the song and its lyrics, his mind forgot to grow suspicious over how she might have come by getting her hair set, much less her decision, after long months, to venture into town.

Even so, she stopped kissing him and pulled slightly away to tell him. "Geis has visited again."

"You are unhurt?" he asked, though his eyes easily took in her figure, her skin, and the cast of her happy face, and gave him the answer.

The mention of Gisbonnhoffer was ever a wet-blanket between the two of them, and Robin knew Marion would not have brought the German Lieutenant up at such a time if there were not something significant to tell, so he resettled his ardor (momentarily), and sat with her on the edge of the country bed as she recounted their recent meeting.

* * *

He had come, again, on horseback. The narrow paths to Thornton's, after all, unassailable by auto. At least they had become even more so since the Occupation.

And indeed, horses were the first words out of his mouth. "Where is my gift?" he asked her, his brows drawn, his eyes casting about for a secondary structure large enough for it to be quartered within.

"Sold," she told him (her first word to him since he had left her by the burning barn), having determined after his last visit that if he were to continue calling on her that if she did consent to speak with him that gone were the days of charming him, of treating him with anything other than the contempt and disgust she felt for him.

"Sold?"

She looked at him as though he were a child. "We have nothing of value, here," she spoke of Mr. Thornton as though he were her family. "No money - little enough grass. Surely no way to feed and stable an animal that can give us nothing in return, neither milk nor eggs nor..." she hesitated to say it, for even in her reduced state she would not have been able to bring herself to do it. "Meat."

"You sold it? To someone as...for..._meat_?" He tried to shrug off the clear smack to his ego, muttering something about the bestial habits of the islanders. He cleared his throat. "I wish to see you, Marion," he skipped ahead to the reason for his visit.

"You are seeing me now," she told him, tucking a strand of hair back into her scarf as she continued with the pitchfork to add from her wooden barrow to the manure pile from the single goat that they did have.

Geis' nose wrinkled in revulsion. "Not here," he nearly felt the need to hold his handkerchief to his nose.

"_Not _at Barnsdale," she told him, her back growing straighter with the refusal.

"No," he assented. "I wish you to join me at Cabaret Alstroemeria. Tomorrow night is to be the final performance of the psychic Joss Tyr, and the OberAdmiral is throwing quite the party for his little pet before they vacate Guernsey to return to Prinzer's preferred home base of the waters surrounding Jersey."

"I'd rather not," she told him, stopping in her work to face him, leaning against her pitchfork.

"I see what is going on," he told her, impressed with his own insight. "You are ashamed of your hair," he settled on pointing out one of the many things that now kept Marion from (as she once had) easily mingling with the German military elite. "You must go and see Ginny Glasson. She has been told to expect you. And to put whatever services you require onto my account."

Her head tilted ever so slightly at this.

"I also have a gift for you," though he hated to give it to her in current state, he held out a brown paper package. He was relieved that she did take it from him.

Realizing the present condition of her hands, Marion tore only at a corner of the paper, quickly recognizing one of her favorite fancy dresses from her abandoned armoire back at Barnsdale. The weight that fell to the bottom of the package assured her that shoes to match had also been included.

She did not attempt to hold back a sigh in reaction to the fact that the clothing (fancy frock and high heels) that he had brought her would, at present, only serve her if she accompanied him. Certainly they would prove of no use to her in her life here.

But what he heard, rather, was a sigh of longing - of a wistfullness for her other pretty things.

"Herr Geis," she told him, "you bring too many gifts."

"You say you do not need gifts," he scolded her gently, a smile pulling at his mouth, "but you need a protector. The world - these islands - are not safe for a woman alone. You will not go hidden here forever."

"Yes," she did not conceal her hesitance at answering him. "You have heard the old saying, 'if you have wronged somebody, do not be proud, offer them friendship. If they reject you, offer a second time, and a third, until they accept.' That is what you must intend to do, I see."

He watched her (she knew he watched her) as she weighed his request. His eyes settled on her hand, and the unfamiliar band she did not even try to hide, upon it. "A gift of jewlery?" he asked, his tone turning arch, "long ago, _from your husband_?"

She scoffed lightly, through her nose, at his immediate assumption and accusation. "And if I told you he were _still_ here? Not truly gone from these islands?" she challenged him. "I shall wear it tomorrow evening, to the Cabaret show," she told him, by way of agreeing to his invitation. "We've neither of us anything further to hide, yes? In fact, why not wear your own, Geis - or haven't you got one?"

* * *

"He will keep giving," Robin announced, as she finished relating the incident. "Though it boggles the mind and boils the blood to think that he brings you your own, rightful property - your very clothes - and calls them a 'gift'."

"I do not see a way around him," she confessed. "Were we to shoot and kill him, we shoot and kill twenty-five Islanders as well."

He grabbed her hands with intensity. "But how can I agree to send you with him? To let you go? As little then as stood between him and what he wanted - that thin veil of formality in agreeing to marry you - there is even less impediment in his mind, now."

When she spoke, she felt like an old woman, explaining the inevitability of death to a small child. "And if I tell him, 'no', what do you think prevents him from having his way, then?"

"You do not understand," he said it quickly, dismissively, the man - the soldier - used to giving orders threatening to make an appearance. "I cannot risk you so."

She met his emotional response with reason. "Can you think of any other way 'round my accepting him?"

Silence fell as he searched his mind.

"No," defeated.

"Then we must risk me," she told him, a faint smile of apology about her lips. "As we risk you every day you are upon the islands. What can he have of me, truly? I will give him nothing, for my sum, my total, is yours entire. And I am convinced that in this he does not wish me violence. Violence toward others, toward things to broker my capitulation - possibly. But it is the single small grace of this situation that for the moment, if I play along, what he wants from me is participation of my own free will. To kindle tender feelings toward him through his giving me gifts. For me to think him kind. To feel that he is wooing me into changing my mind - into winning me over."

"And when that changes?" his eyes had gone from frustration bordering anger to barely held-back despair.

She did not want it to, but found her own face changing to mirror his own. "I can only say that I do not see it changing tonight." She held onto him.

And he to her.

* * *

"What shall we do to preserve this expensive hairstyle, then?" he asked her, now that he knew Gisbonnhoffer had paid for it, and would be expecting it to be on display this evening.

"Tear it out," she told him, between kisses. "Don't leave me with a roll or a hairpin left in it. Dismantle it. _Destroy_ it. Shave my head like Samson to have it off me. Only, do _not_ stop kissing me."

"Do you really mean that?" he asked, narrowing one eye.

A beat passed when her lips paused in their devouring of him. "Well, perhaps not...entirely. But the jist of it, certainly. Ravish me, Robin Oxley, until I cease to recall what a hairstyle is."

"Fair enough," he agreed, quite willing. "What say you then, Ladies' Choice?"

She had him rolled onto his back before he noticed his trousers were undone.

* * *

**Barnsdale - Carriage House's 2nd floor Chauffeur's Quarters -** _Quite nice up here_, Allen always thought to himself of the two small-scale flats located above the auto garage at Barnsdale. Of course, Gisbonnhoffer's young guards did little to keep the place tidy (much less presentable), and the household staff, not tasked with cleaning beyond the house (and several outbuildings that serviced the house) proper, did nothing to allay the clutter and disarray.

It was always a dependable spot to look in when trolling for wagering sports of any kind, and today was no exception. Besides three off-duty Jerries, a young Island Constable he had not met before was throwing dice. Rowan, his name was, and seeming to be as new to dice as he was to the Island civilian constabulary force.

Allen was more than happy to oblige taking the young chap on, and, in short order, taking quite a bit of his money.

As he picked up his winnings from the pot, Allen half-noticed a slip of plain paper stuck in and among the scrip and Reichmarks - and even several bills of the old Guernsey currency (valued only by the staunchest of Islanders). But the dice were hot, luck was his benevolent mistress for the moment, and he took time to neither count his winnings before playing on, nor notice the young constable - now bereft of any bankroll to play further - slink away from the carriage house and back toward his duties in St. Peter Port.

* * *

**ENGLISH CHANNEL - waters around Sark -** Roger Stoker trod as quietly as he thought possible toward the submarine's command center, hoping to located Legg and get a more-accurate quote on their arrival time.

Naturally, Legg had instructed that silence at any cost must be observed once they were in Jerry-controlled waters, and Stoker knew he was not to be set loose of the sub until full-dark at the earliest. (Assuming the waters they were in were clear enough of Jerries to risk surfacing.)

But knowing such specifics, he found, could not truly quell his anticipation. He had packed and re-packed his knapsack. Dressed and re-dressed himself twice to be sure everything was on target.

After all, after such a long time in its planning, he owed it to Operation Pellinore to get everything just right.

Tonight, if he were to hear the Nightwatch (and certainly he hoped he did) it would be live. Live, and in the company of the best dead men he knew.

**...TBC...**


	35. Intentions Good and Bad

**SARK - HQ of German Outpost -** Island Constable Paxton shifted on the outdoor bench he had been directed toward to wait for an audience with Sark's ReichKaptain Lamburg. He felt the heavy jewel of the mysterious ring Philippe had brought to him weighing down the interior pocket of his uniform coat. His British-inspired domed policeman's helmet rested upon his knee.

Really, he could not believe his good fortune. Such a find, and, thanks to the trusting (and possibly simple) Philippe, something so valuable left totally under his control. It had been the natural order of his thoughts to offer it for sale to the most powerful man on the island.

He knew he, himself, was not an impressive man. Not to these Germans, anyway. His domain of Sark was small, crime within it infrequent before the war, and he held authority over but a two-cell jail - which prior to the Occupation had housed only the occasional more-irritating-than-dangerous drunk.

But he _was_ the sole constable for the island entire, and that had always afforded him some respect among the local populace. His provincial mind, though not far-seeing, nor of a political bent, had eagerly seized upon the found ring, determined that it would prove his ticket (monetarily) to a more affluent level of existence and influence than he had currently known.

Around him, also out-of-doors from the office proper, various portable examples of livestock could be found: a cage of chickens, a small pig on a rope leash, two goats, and an unshorn sheep. Each accompanied by their respective owners.

Lamburg had been appointed to oversee them - the Sarkese - after all, due to his agricultural background, the islanders had been told. As Sark was to prove a key part of the breadbasket that would be used to feed the nearly trebled population of the Islands (with the introduction of the occupying German army at a ratio of 2:1), it was crucial that their Kommandant know both livestock and crops, how best to manage _them_ - and to manage the people whose support he would need to ensure the farming industry (and therefore the Reich's food supply) on Sark continued to flourish.

The ReichKaptain was well-respected, and, in the absence of the island having even a single veterinarian at their disposal, sometimes expected to (and often successful at) diagnosing animal illnesses when conventional wisdom (and even arcane island lore) fell short of a cure.

Hence, the waiting line today. Paxton reckoned he was on the docket somewhere behind the ailing shoat. He relaxed his shoulders. He had plenty of time, then, to study on what he would say to the ReichKaptain.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Barnsdale Estate -** It was coming on evening by the time Robin had found him still nearby the carriage house. On the whole, Allen Dale had gambled the day away, which of course was quite satisfying. The missed opportunity for a proper luncheon, and now, the early cold supper being served to the staff at the house - somewhat less so.

It had been a cold supper, he had been informed, as Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer was bound for St. Peter Port this evening, and Fraulein Eleri had announced that _she_ would be retiring early.

So, no reason to kindle the cookstoves if the 'family' of the house (he tried not to scoff outside of his head at the ridiculous, undeserved label granted them by the staff) were not themselves sitting down to table.

* * *

"Dale, you've got to smuggle me into St. Peter Port," Robin had pressed him almost immediately, when Allen'd found him at the agreed-upon rendezvous.

"I'm to go that way, Boss," Allen had informed his superior officer. "Tasked by Gisbonnhoffer to use the Kommandant's car to drive him to the night's Cabaret. The boot's yours, free of charge - though you might find the exhaust doesn't vent as well as a shut-in passenger might like."

"There's more," Oxley had continued, his face becoming quite intent as he spoke on. "A one-nighter at Cabaret Alstroemeria."

Allen's first thought was (dependably) toward logistics, rather than motivation.

"_Plongeur_?" Allen asked, thinking that might be do-able, what with the large crowd expected for the infamous psychic's farewell performance, and a rare, full-meal to be served rather than the cabaret's usual bits and bites of cheeses and sweets - things to enhance drinks. No, banquet fare was predicted for tonight. Proper dinner plates, settings of silver, rather a lot of glassware. Lots of plates needing washing-up.

"No," Robin disagreed with Allen's suggestion. "I've got to be out on the floor - waiting tables, or - _sommelier_? I could manage that."

"_Sommelier_?" Allen questioned him, now growing suspicious. He counseled against it. "That's a bit ambitious for a come-out-of-nowhere chap, ain't it? Sure to raise a few too many eyebrows." He paused, wanting to clarify his own abilities in regard to fixing such things, "not that, mind you, I couldn't fix it in a trice. I could get you _Maitre d'_, only - too obvious. _Garcon_'s more like it. They'll have needed a few extras, I've no doubt. I can call in a favor and get you on the floor for the night but -" now it came together, Robin's interest and his last-minute request.

Allen shook his head with the realization of Robin's out-of-nowhere plan. "He's taking Marion, wot?" He let out a noisy exhale. "That's a bad idea, right there. Should refuse to do it. For your own good."

"Wasn't a request, Soldier," Robin un-admirably pulled rank.

Allen craftily appeared to move forward in their planning, while trying to discourage him. "Wot'll you wear, then?"

"Sneak upstairs, into what once was Clem's room. Surely he's left something for formal dress behind for you to nick me for a night."

Allen actually snorted, thinking of the rugby-ready form of Nighten. "It'll not fit _you_, Ox."

"Have you forgotten?" Robin teased him, giving him a slap (that only half-registered as friendly) up the back of his head, causing the length of Dale's combed-back gingerish half-curls to come forward over his forehead and brow before he could push them back into slick, fashionable place.

"It's a war on," Robin needlessly explained. "_All_ Islanders have lost weight. The only men present tonight who'll _fit_ their tuxedos will be Jerries who haven't yet burst their armholes '_Heil Hitler_'ing."

"True enough," Allen had to agree, beaten. "But I still say it's a rum idea. And a bloody indulgent one at that."

"Noted," said Robin, with a half-grin he could not suppress over having managed to find a way to spy on Marion and Gisbonnhoffer. "I shall be sure to list your stringent objections in my next report."

* * *

**Waters near Sark -** "Right," said Legg, somehow commanding an absolutely soft-as-down tone as he finished his briefing of Stoker before they prepared to surface and launch the boat.

_Impossible_, thought Stoker, finding he actually had to crane his neck to hear the other man. Ron Legg; giant, exuberant, man of the thunderous laugh, able to pitch his voice just above a whisper. _Unimaginable_.

"You've three days before we can return, and the boat you've been given will hold three. Three average-sized men. No more. And one, as you know, 's meant to be you. Stow it among the caves until the third day. When we surface, signal us with the flash torch from shore. If you are not there on the third day, _we_ must pursue our orders and return home. If we are not there on the third day, re-attempt the rendezvous the fourth and fifth, and so on. But do NOT launch the boat without receiving our signal in return. She's more a dingy, really, than a proper launch, and she'll not last long out on the open water."

Stoker nodded his agreement to all that had been said. "I have a letter for you," he said. "In, in case -"

Legg's eyes showed that he need not explain more. The Naval Commander (and captain of the sub) accepted the fully-addressed envelope.

"Never did have one written before," he confessed. "Wrote it up just now, on the trip here."

**...TBC...**


	36. Faints and Feints

**GUERNSEY - St. Peter Port -** At Gisbonnhoffer's express instructions, Allen had driven to Ginny Glasson's shop to collect Lady Marion - there being, apparently, no car track by which to collect her from wherever on the island she was presently lodging. (A location which Robin had not shared, even, with him.)

Glasson's shop was separated from the Cabaret's stage door by only an alley, yet Geis had made it clear he expected him to pull into a space near the shop's front, and then, when he and Marion had returned to the car, and Allen had closed the door upon them in the back seat, expected him to round the driveable streets - traveling five blocks instead of them walking far less than one on foot - so that they might present themselves at the front door of Alstroemeria in the auto, and be grandly assisted by the doorman on duty there.

At the sight of Marion approaching the car on Geis' tuxedoed arm, Allen nearly broke into a visible sweat. She was dressed in a muted brass-gold (nearly, he supposed, chartreuse) cocktail number. The narrow skirt was cut below the knee, but above the full calf, giving all the benefit of viewing her legs. The delicate, nearly invisible netting that covered her from shoulder to wrist, and neck to decolletage, allowed the occasional embroidery embellishments stitched into the netting to appear to be resting (or hovering) solely - even magically - upon her skin, and gave the frock the illusion of being held up by nothing, but rather being purely strapless. Her hair, glossy with being styled, was rolled as highly and as tightly (and as fetchingly) as any of the Andrews Sisters'. And the seams on her nylons were impeccably straight. (He sometimes forgot, in the current climate of privation, what a nylon seam could do to a man's mind as it snuggled there, tracking on, up the back of the knee, into regions unseen, like yet-uncharted seas on ancient maps: '_Beyond this, there be dragons_'. (Dragons, his rover's mind had always thought, really standing in for the word, 'adventures'.)

_Cor-blimey_. Allen had never been so glad he had locked up a boot as he was in that instant. He imagined Marion at that moment in Robin's sights: that was the sort of vision that inspired a man to madness - of the Grecian variety, he was certain. He had no doubt that Robin and she had been on bedroom-intimate terms for a good part (if not all) of the day. And he had no doubt such a frustrated connection had inspired Robin's near-idiotic order to be found a night's employment at the Cabaret. Seeing Marion like this - _and_ on Gisbonnhoffer's arm - no good could come of it.

As he held the door for them, and handed her in to Geis, within the auto, he saw that the netting extended to meet the solid fabric of the frock well below the upper back.

He struggled, and won the effort not to throw her even a covert look of concern over the fact she had outfitted herself on par with a fully-dressed stuffed pig on a covered silver charger bound for the plate of an infamous glutton.

Marion Nighten, he reminded himself, was no idiot.

And yet, he could not keep from thinking of a matador, waving a red cape (for all that it was a chartreuse frock in this instance) at a charging bull.

* * *

To pass the time in the darkened, air-growing-stale boot, Robin had let his mind drift, briefly, into memory. Well, it had not _entirely_ had his permission.

Due to his plans for the night, he had serving at table on his mind...

How he had stormed that night at everything - at everyone. As though each in the party, in their turn, were the reason he took no enjoyment in anything. Bonchurch was there, of course, seated opposite him at the nightclub's dancefloor-side table, at constantly encouraging him to take repeated turns about the floor with the girls they had brought along on the night's unending bender. But he had grown more than tired of the company offered by the disappointingly prim Renata Sewell-Spitt; Louella Dickon, unable to speak of much else other than her own, perceived inadequacies (such as being of an exceptional height for a woman); and Midge Lowry, whom someone had clearly told that what men liked best was to discuss rugby - in depth.

He had positioned himself (following the last dance) beside the petite-ly voluptuous blonde, Lily Goshawk-Revden, largely because she was the least chatty of the quartet. He was pretending to be fully engaged by the band playing, and the female lead singer, when their server had arrived with the additional champagne they had called for.

The champagne the man spilled on him quickly soaked through his jacket and onto his shirt. He was incensed.

Mumbling a thousand apologies, the man had scurried away to find a clean towel for the (rather expensive, at what they would be charged for a bottle) mess. Robin fumed, catching the eye of another server, and demanding the immediate appearance of the Maitre d'.

It was at this moment he realized that Bonchurch had taken up a position standing behind him.

"You ass," he heard his friend (surprisingly) say, his voice kept low to keep from alarming the girls. It is bad enough you have ruined the night for the rest of us with your sulk. Now you will see this man sacked? And for what? Spilling champagne on your shirt that - in two hours' time you, yourself will have done _several_ times?"

Robin began to turn around and share with Mitch some of the venom he had been saving for the requested Maitre d', but Mitch spoke on, leaving no opening for interruptions without raised voices being necessary.

"You're not mad at him - nor at us. You're in a temper over your bruised shoulder - but more so for losing the Argent Arrow. The Tripp will have another chance next year to win the cup! Tonight _should_ have seen you in a pub, scaring up a fight with some tough who'd give you some real pain in place of your own self-pity. Not spoiling _our_ fun - and punishing some poor waiter for an accident which he could not have helped."

Robin brought his eyes to Mitch's quietly impassioned (and righteous) ones.

But Mitch was not to be scared off. "You do not know what his life is - what turns his day has taken! With your censure, he'll not be hired back by any decent club in all London. Think! What you're about to do!"

Before Robin could reply (or even, in fact, settle on how he might), the Maitre d' (as called for) had arrived.

Robin cleared his throat. He was chastised enough to feel somewhat sheepish, the fire gone out of his bad humor, leaving him with only the same, the constant, ennui. "Here, my good man," he gestured to the Maitre d'. "For the chap who's been serving at our table," it was a larger-than-usual roll of bills. "And," he added as the Maitre d' had turned to go, catching the crook of his arm to hold him back for a second more. "I should strongly suggest giving him the rest of the night off."

He did not know how Mitch always managed to do that. To see further into a personal situation than others, to have such a tender (and open) heart toward the problems of others. Robin truly wondered how one found time for it.

There was a song Marion had played several times on the Nightwatch - a song popular in America, she had said. "_Keep on the Sunny Side_".

And inevitably, there you would find Mitch the day after, or the next, singing it with all his heart, as though he had co-opted it as his credo: '_Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side/Keep on the sunny side of life/It will help you everyday, it will brighten all the way/If you keep on the sunny side of life_.'

Mitch was one to sing with all his heart. Certainly his ear for a tune, and his vocal cords, had little enough to do with the exercise.

The boot of the Kommandant's auto suddenly seemed to grow appreciably smaller and darker than it had been just a moment ago. Robin felt his grief like a blockage within his chest, his two choices, as ever; to swallow it back down, or to cough it up - exorcize it with tears too sincere and rending to be shed silently.

But he found (as he sometimes did) _that_ grief so coupled with other, similar griefs: what he had thought was the forever-loss of Marion (twice), Dunkirk, the war, the larger number of the unit earlier that he had been unable to save, even what had stood at the time as the relationship with the Earl, his father - that instead of agreeing to go back down or come up, it simply sat in his chest, threatening to choke him, rendering him unable to speak - and only half-able to draw breath.

* * *

Once they were parked safely near the rear service entrance of the Cabaret, this was how Allen, upon opening the boot, found him. Red-rimmed eyes, sweat on his brow, his voice not yet able to be depended upon.

"Don't recall you being adverse to tight spots before, Boss," Allen scolded him as he offered him a hand out.

"Give us a handkin," was all Robin could bring himself to say, using the offered handkerchief to mop his brow and wipe at his eyes, still at giving orders, still at determined to see the night through. Fifteen pounds heavier, but familiarly so, with his unspent, his unexpendable, grief.

* * *

Allen, as predicted, had no trouble getting Robin added to the night's list of workers. Clem Nighten's tuxedo (its ill-fit, and presently unfashionable cut notwithstanding) was far-nicer than those the rest of the night's potential serving staff had managed to scare up.

"What's this about, then?" the floor manager had inquired, curiously. "You've money to bribe me to take him on - because of a debt, you say - yet you cannot settle with him using the same cash?"

"Oh, aye, that," Allen blew it off. "Bribing _you_, Timothy, 'tis cheaper than what I owe him. He's of a mind to make more tonight than my debt entire."

"Mind you," Timothy cautioned, "they're only promised a go at the leftovers. Some of the customers _do_ tip - but it's certainly not standard. And not all of them tip in _standard_ ways." His eyes gave a 'you know' look.

"Good enough for me," Allen promised him, giving a distant wave to Robin, now within the kitchens and getting a brief tour.

Allen felt relief at seeing that his commanding officer's demeanor had settled considerably since leaving the car. He looked down to where he had just given over to Timothy from his bankroll (never, of course, having withdrawn it entirely from his pocket). It was a bit mussy, as he had taken time neither to count nor to arrange it all day. Here again, he noticed, was the worthless piece of paper that had somehow been shuffled in with what he had won off that young island Constable. Vaguely curious (information, sometimes even of the variety that you are not looking for, is always power), he turned it over in his hands.

It was easy to see that it was the rough draft of something, several attempts at sentences could be made out, but they were also scratched upon and re-written, as though someone were at composing something a bit more important than just the average friendly letter or note.

He walked back to the car, still trying to make it all out. Night had well fallen, and available light was not on his side. He struck a match and lit himself a smoke. Smoking always did clear his head for thinking. He threw his chauffeur's hat onto the driver's seat, inserted the key into the ignition, and powered up the headlamps, walking toward their more-than adequate light.

(Of course he had no business doing so, with a blackout in effect, but, as an undercover British officer, one could hardly fault him for not caring if one of His Majesty's bombers sighted the headlamps and used their light to rain bombs down upon the Jerry officers filling the Cabaret behind him. In this, he did not think of himself, nor Robin, nor Marion.) He stood facing the car (and the headlamps' light), and was finally able to piece together the scrap.

'_Herr Kommandant_,' it read, with of course a great many changes and corrections, '_You are too powerful to get near, but I have found someone close to you who is not. And I mean to hurt you where it hurts most. If you will visit Striplings' Camera and Films on the shopping street in St. Peter Port, there is a packet of photos waiting there for you. I think you will find your daughter smiling very prettily in each one. I have taken from her what no one can ever give back, and soon the island entire will know her for a strumpet, through the photographs (and first-hand accounts of several witnesses I have invited to oversee - and if they wish, participate in - the deed). You are a killer, and it is very easy - if one looks - to find Islanders willing to help in bringing you pain - as you have brought pain to so many_.'

The rough draft of the note was not signed, but he hardly needed such proof to know it for the work of young Rowan.

His mind took a moment to seethe at what fate the young Constable had planned for Eleri, himself now realizing _this_ was the person to whom she had referred when she had asked him about 'pleasing' a man. This event had obviously been, somewhat, in the planning.

He could almost hear a click as a tumbler in his mind fell into place, recalling that Eleri had just this evening informed the Barnsdale staff she was to have an early night.

He tossed his fag to the ground and crushed it out under his foot. What an easily distracted idiot he was - not questioning why she would willingly miss her beloved Joss Tyr's final performance in favor of an 'early' night.

He stuffed the now-quite-valuable note into the double-buttoned placket of his chauffeur's uniform jacket, and threw himself into the driver's seat, intent on Barnsdale, and hoping he would arrive in time.

* * *

**Cabaret Alstroemeria -** Marion did not have to make a true effort at studying Geis' shirt's fancy studs as she danced with him. Certainly there was nothing any longer of interest to her about his face or person otherwise.

He was one of a certain number of officers present who had managed to secure proper tuxedos for the night. The rest - the majority - simply wore their very best dress uniforms, their hats removed as they were indoors. Being in civilian formal wear should have taken some of the edge, surely, off her feelings for the Nazi Lieutenant, but, today it assuredly did not.

The night's main entertainment of Prinzer's pet psychic, the notorious Joss Tyr, was not scheduled to take the stage for some time. At present a band played, and various singers took turns at the microphone while those so inclined, danced. Dinner was to be served just prior to the show.

Mostly, Marion had to discipline her mind not to think of Robin, to try and insert him into such an evening, or fall prey to nostalgia for the many times past they had danced in nightclubs far superior to this tissue paper and paste representation of one.

She would not let herself delve into memory or a present desire to be near him. She would not give Geis the satisfaction of looking at her, and seeing that happiness, that delight within her eyes and having any reason to think that _he_ might have been responsible for putting it there.

She had no idea how the evening might play out - how Gisbonnhoffer expected it to play out. But she did think that this night - their first back within each others' company - she might quite reasonably avoid any physical advances without angering him.

_Preventing him from holding her within his embrace while they were dancing?_ Another impediment entirely. And one she had chosen to endure, rather than scheme to overcome.

The song ended, and he returned her (still on his arm) to their very intimately small table. A waiter's arm came from her right and offered her the night's menu, which she took somewhat absentmindedly, having been momentarily distracted by his cufflinks, which bore no small resemblance to a pair her brother had worn with some frequency during their island holidays.

Her eyes, as it was before her, went to the menu, exquisitely hand-calligraphed in German. In the low lighting she lowered the parchment-heavy paper in order to see it better by the light of their table's ruby glass-enclosed candle. She noticed the date at the top. _So late in the month?_ her mind asked her. _Already?_ She hardly knew the number of the days anymore. The day of the week she was generally more solid on. Life had become so changed with Mr. Thornton.

She worried to herself over how long Geis would see fit to keep her out - her only true concern of the night being that she had a single appointment she must not miss: the Nightwatch. As it was, here in the dark, at a time (due to the ridiculously early curfew and lack of candles or lamp oil) she and Mr. Thornton would have been asleep for hours, she struggled somewhat to keep awake, her mind working, her guard up.

But the date. That was a troubling thing to have lost track of. She let her mind muse on that and its implications further.

Geis had ordered them drinks. She hated the way he spoke to wait staff. She always had. There was never anything impolite in his address (especially if they were doing an acceptable job), but even with Barnsdale's household staff she always sensed something, some undertone as he ordered them about that to her ear rang of a self-satisfaction, a delight in having someone to direct that had no choice but to obey.

Her drink was placed appropriately, removed from a tray again by an arm bearing those very familiar cufflinks. She followed the white-gloved waiter's hand up beyond the cuff and along the arm of the suit coat he wore. She got as far as the bowtie before her heart fell. _A dimple, an imperfect crease in an otherwise impeccably practiced bowknot_.

Like a person witnessing a railway accident, she found herself unable to look away. He already had her eyes. (And of course, as she had trothed in front of La Salle and the others, her heart...) Had she not turned so cold with dread at his recklessly being here (and not only here, but at present standing betwixt her and Gisbonnhoffer), she would have blazed molten hot outrage at him.

Seeing all of that within her eyes, Robin immediately took the lead. "Lady Marion," he said, as though formally greeting her, with a deferential nod of his head. "Please accept my condolences - and those of my family - on the death of Sir Edward." His eyes held hers, now expectantly, waiting to see how she would respond.

She knew he had only said it, only mentioned it aloud, to see if speaking her father's name would niggle at Gisbonhoffer. This knowledge did nothing to lessen her own coming-on emotional reaction to his (if he had been anyone else, pretty) speech.

As he had known it would, the mention of Sir Edward re-focused Marion's mind away from her immediate desire to see him drawn and quartered, and became the opening salvo in his undercover working of their table.

"You knew Sir Edward?" Geis asked him (as Robin had suspected he would). The Lieutenant's eyebrows raised in vague, polite curiosity.

"Aye," Robin answered him, this man at present appearing to be his better, "but only indirectly. As a boy, through a woman my family knew working at the estate, he granted my brother and I free reign over his lakes and ponds."

Geis gave a benign nod appropriate to such small talk, moving on to what he saw as the central question in any such exchange. "And so you will also have a familiarity with her ladyship?" His eyes flicked over toward Marion, surprised to note that even a passing mention of her deceased father could still affect her composure.

"No," Robin backtracked, hitting the perfect pitch of a man who had, perhaps, over-bragged. "We two were only ever on the grounds when the family was absent."

Marion noted the sorry fit of his (rather, Clem's) old suit. He had always been slender in comparison to most men, but especially to Clem, who was ever at having to have his shirts let out in the chest, to make way for his brawny frame.

She wondered if Robin noticed, as he would have in the old days. If it pinched at him - even in the far reaches of his mind - to be so ill fit. Certainly she had noticed that at present she could have benefited from several taking-ins of her frock's waist. When she had shown up at Ginny's, Ginny had done her best on short notice with her needle, but it was hardly a proper fitting session.

For the sake of Gisbonnhoffer (and the other officers' eyes) Marion had not very much cared. But now, well, even in her anger with Robin, even with everything else going on, she would have liked to rest in the knowledge that she looked her best.

"That is true," Marion agreed, backing up his story. "When father and Clem were on holiday, they made use of those waters for themselves. They would have expected solitude in those times."

Gisbonnhoffer smiled. "You are all but an old friend, then. Come," Geis generously offered, "sit with us for a moment and reminisce." He threw his hand out toward a chair, though adding a third at their small table would prove something of a crowd. An excess of knees, alone, would prove difficult to navigate.

"Do you smoke?" Gisbonnhoffer asked, extending a cigarette toward him, not waiting for Robin's answer before also extending a lit match. Without protest (though Marion knew he had given it up), Robin accepted both, removing his glove in the taking of it.

"I am sorry," Marion tried to fill what she thought was likely bordering-on precarious silence. "I," she shook her head as though lightly dismayed, "I do not recall your name."

Robin nodded at her, as any of the locals might, accepting her apology for not being able to remember them each distinctly. "Earl Oxnard," he said, confidence in every syllable. "My father was Laird, Laird Oxnard."

Coolly, as though he was already beginning to grow bored with their guest, Geis asked, "And do you have family on the island, Mr. Oxnard?"

"Yes, yes I do. As a matter of fact...I am newly married."

"Is that so?" Geis looked to Marion to gauge her response at this news, his coming-on boredom evaporated.

"Let us then wish you all happiness," she said, her tone not entirely committed to lauding such tidings, but rather distant (as it might be, a Lady wishing such to a mere, unknown-to-her peasant).

"Thank you, thank you both," Robin began, before Geis interrupted and called for another server to bring them a third glass, that they might toast this Oxnard's marital future with it.

"She is but a local girl," Robin continued, determined, Marion thought, to somehow in all this get her own goat as well as Gisbonnhoffer's. "But good at her chores, and true to a fault."

"And is she fair of face?" Geis asked, with renewed interest.

"_My_ eyes have never seen her equal," Robin responded, all the while not taking his eyes off Marion's. "Present company, of course," he added, nodding to her, "excepted."

It was all she could do to incline her head as one might when accepting such a compliment for real.

"And what do you think of our 'model' occupation of your islands?" Geis asked him, not liking the way this man was looking at Marion. "Do you kiss our hands in the light and plot to overthrow us in the night?"

At this, Robin displayed a very good show of balking at the sudden turn taken in Gisbonnhoffer's questioning. He even turned vaguely white at the gills from the sinister undertone of it.

"Me, Sir?" he used a formal address for the Lieutenant. "I only hope to make enough tonight so that when I return home I'll have some little left for the Mrs."

A moment passed, and Marion decided to step in. "Of course you do, Mr. Oxnard," she spoke as though to comfort him, as if he were one of the many islanders who knew her on sight, but with whom she had no personal relation.

"Then you had best get back to your present business," Geis directed him abruptly, the pitch of his voice dropping to the floor, now barren of all amity, dismissing Robin from his comfortable spot at their table. "As we are not yet served, and the show meant to start straightaway."

Robin performed a reasonable facsimile of a chastened garcon, and disappeared toward the kitchen in search of their portion of the banquet.

"Marion," Geis commented, reaching to place his hand atop hers. "Was it wrong of me to invite him to sit with us a moment?" His right eye narrowed. "You look positively flush from the encounter."

"No," she worked to assure him, "No. It is only, I suppose, that," she let herself take a breath, "meeting him too keenly reminds me of the happy past."

* * *

**Barnsdale - Carriage House -** Seeing the unexpected return of the Kommandant's driver (a position of some small power, as when a soldier was expected to be working he certainly did not wish to be caught out by a man who potentially had Vaiser's - or Gisbonnhoffer's - ear), the quartet of Geis' guard that had been milling about, waiting for the nights entertainments to begin, cleared off without requiring so much as a 'boo' from Allen.

For once, since the unit had become stranded on these islands, Allen Dale had no reason to cage his anger - and to the situation he brought more than it (and Rowan's black plans), solely, inspired within him. It was a rare chance to be fully true to himself, no playacting.

Seeing which of the bedchamber doors was at present closed, he half-stomped toward it, murder on his brow, and soundly kicked it in without even feeling the unpleasant friction the action birthed in his knee and hip.

There was the young Constable Rowan, there was Eleri, upon the bed. And there, there was the weapon - rather, the camera. So at least the deed was not yet done. The young constable was stripped to the waist, his braces dangling about his hips.

Eleri must have packed herself a bag and smuggled it from the main house here, as there was no way Allen could imagine her (even her) attempting to walk about on the grounds in only the lacey afterthought of a negligee she wore.

"Frau-_lein_ Eler_iiii_," he let his voice mimic what he could recall of the relentless, unable to be ignored voices of men who had overseen the unit's strenuous training regimen.

Her eyes registered his entry and presence there with something not unlike inveterate hatred. At the very least, one might say in that moment she would have, like a viper, spat poison, were she so equipped.

"Clear off," Allen told her, danger bleeding into his already authoritarian tone. "_Schnell_," he added, never having taken his eyes off Rowan.

This was a mistake. Eleri shot up from the bed with a banshee shriek and threw herself at Allen, half at scratching for his eyes, the other half at trying to find something to kick. To Rowan, it looked like the Kommandant's driver was caught in a whirlwind of fru-fru and a whirligig of appendages.

But Allen proved as quick as she proved impassioned. In one moment he had her by the shank of her let-down hair. But smart enough to know that grasping the entire clump was sure to hurt less than twisting only a small, but more tender amount, he employed the latter technique, finding himself able to reasonably control her movements by jerks and tugs.

Without another word to her, as one does with a cat in heat, he put her outside, literally stranding her on the upper balcony of the carriage house, which overlooked the garage space where the estate's cars would have once been housed, outside the two chauffeur's flats, but still (for whatever of modesty's sake was left) within doors.

Taking himself back to the bedroom, he found Rowan quickly attempting to rewind the films within his camera and (apparently) salvage whatever he could of their cut-short lovemaking session.

It had been more than a little while since Allen had had the occasion to employ a proper shakedown (or, indeed, receive one), but once learned, such things are never forgotten.

He knocked the camera out of the man's hand with a solid and dependable closed fist of his own. The apparatus came apart upon colliding into the floor. Using that same fist, he cuffed Rowan into the nearest spot of open wall.

"Empty your pockets," he demanded, his voice no longer rough, as his actions were instead - grabbing the younger man by the Adam's apple (between thumb and knuckle of his first finger) to insure he kept his place up against the wall.

Out came the pockets' contents onto the nearest chair seat. Two additional canisters of film (likely still unexposed), a druggist's phial which Allen grabbed (along with the films) and popped open to smell, pulling it away from his nose with a jerk when he recognized it as ether in nature. It was a conservative amount, what a person might use to smother unwanted kittens (or render insensible unsuspecting young women). He tossed the phial toward the room's pedestal sink, where its glass tinkled against the porcelain as the liquid ran down the drain. The canisters, and what small amount of monies the Constable had left to his name from his losses earlier in the day, he pocketed.

"Who am I?" he asked the young man, rhetorically, relaxing his hold on the Adam's apple enough that Rowan might speak - though belaboredly.

He could not quite manage the 'th' sound of 'the'. "'Kommandant's man."

"That's right," Allen agreed with a head nod. "And as I am the Kommandant's man, I am also Miss Eleri's man. Out to protect _his_ interest - and hers."

Rowan coughed. "And I am Rowan," he tried unsuccessfully to announce with disdain, Allen's grip on his throat impeding artful vocal expression of any kind. "Son of Dunne. Orphaned by your Kommandant. My father killed for naught but his kindness." He tried to straighten his shoulders, to telegraph defiance. His eyes bugged. "And I am at my revenge."

"'Well I know it," Allen leaned in and half-whispered along his cheek, into Rowan's ear. "But hear me. I have your note, I have the evidence I see here with my eyes. We both of us know whom the Kommandant will believe. Consider that your revenge is spent." He could see the terror that his aggression inspired in this man's eyes, along with this Rowan's oppositional desire to overcome it in favor of nursing his hatred. An hatred so great he would destroy a non-combatant in the twisted illustration of it.

Naturally, Allen could more than match the constable's abhorrence of the Kommandant. Certainly he knew of deed upon deed upon deed for which justice demanded the sadist answer. But for all the daughters Vaiser had ordered tortured, or raped, or killed - assaulting Eleri was no way to affect that justice. And not solely because Vaiser felt next to nothing for her.

So though he agreed with this Rowan's root motivator (though he could even, perhaps, respect it), he knew he would have to emerge from this moment bloodier than he would have liked. He reached for the knife that was among the things emptied from the man's pockets. Unsnapping it from the small leather sheath that it wore, he sliced its blade horizontally across one of Rowan's palms. Deep enough to rend skin and fat, and certain to scar (if not in future impede the use of some of his fingers).

"_That_ is so you remember," he warned him. "If you approach Fraulein Eleri ever again - even for a moment's chat - I will go to the Kommandant with my evidence, and you, and _whatever may be left of your family_ will pay dearly for your failed revenge." He gave Rowan a heavier push, grinding his shoulders back into the wall, and took several steps backward and away from him.

"You're not much of an _Islander_, Collaborator," the young constable spat at him, cradling his bleeding palm as he added several choice slurs onto the accusation.

"You can say that again, Mate," Allen vocally (though subduedly) agreed, as he brought his legs to step over the felled bedroom door, and he walked toward the flat's door that opened into the interior of the carriage house to collect troublesome and sure-to-be-truculent Eleri, and shuttle her back through the night's dark to the estate's main house.

* * *

**Cabaret Alstroemeria -** She had ceased counting the number of dances and tallying the songs they had heard played by the time the psychic's act was about to - finally - begin. It was after midnight, the final courses of the banquet only now being served to tables.

To her relief they had seen little enough of Robin, other than him filling their glasses and serving and removing their plates, since Geis had dismissed him back to his job. Even so, she felt like a veritably struck lightning rod every time he came anywhere near her.

And of course he seemed to relish it, bringing his arm, extended to give or take a plate or glass, closer to her shoulder or back than it needed be. He was fortunate in the dim lighting of the venue (and in the black of Clem's tuxedo) that Geis (and anyone else looking) would have a hard time noting these inappropriate overtures if she did not herself point them out.

A sparkle of confetti and a burst of aromatic scent announced the arrival of Joss Tyr. As was his usual way, he began the show with a series of jokes, usually at the expense of the suffering Islanders. Weeks after (for he rarely told the same joke twice) one could still hear them circulating, now having made their way down into the Jerry ranks.

She was so exhausted, and so over-stimulated by Robin's ill-planned crashing of the occasion, as the night wore on she found it increasingly difficult to curb what was already the large degree of personal disgust she had decided to no longer disguise from Geis.

"Film star W.C. Fields," Tyr was going on, "is noted for saying that one should never work with children or dogs. How convenient then - ought we to draft him an invitation tonight - to join us here on these islands?"

Approving and spluttering laughter filled the room.

Marion felt a withering glance take over her face as she heard Geis' laughter join with the others. Geis, who rarely laughed at anything, who was generally so sober-faced in any instance as to strike one, nearly, as sole owner of a funeral parlor.

What she did not know was that he was feeling the lift of more than several glasses of good wine, and basking in what he saw as his accomplishment of successfully enticing her to join him.

She was the finest-dressed and most finely bred woman in the room. That the other women in the room were in general husbandless housewives- or inexperienced teenaged-girls-turned-Jerrybags only with the advent of the Occupation (and every one of them from simple, unsophisticated island stock) was lost on him. _He_ was the man present in possession of the diamond, the treasure that was Marion. He could hardly help but be chuffed at such a truth.

And so he laughed.

"How _can_ you express amusement at such cruelty?" Marion asked him - one of her few questions of the night, as she had generally avoided any speech that might lead into further conversation.

"Well," he reminded her, not immediately marking her irritation with him, "there are no dogs - and very few children - here. His is a keen observation."

"There are no dogs," her voice threatened to ring out beyond the space their table occupied, "because pets were ordered euthanized in the days before your landing. The fear then (which I might well add has more than come to pass) was that due to wartime privation there mightn't be enough food for humans - much less animals." Her eyes stopped in their fluttering, impassioned movement, for a moment settling on his to announce the guilt of it. "People here were expected to consent to the killing of animals they treasured most - because of _you_."

His face, as she might have expected, remained placid, the smile from his earlier laugh not fully wiped from it.

"And as for _children_," he ought to be thankful she did not rise to pound her fist on the table in her decrying of his behavior. "Have you not seen the eyes of an Islander when they _do_ clap onto one of the rare children left - or born - since the Occupation? There is nearly a greed within them. Young or old, we here are a dying people! We have sacrificed our beloved pets in the wake of your soulless gods, and we have lost our children as sure as Hamelin Town, sent them far away so that they no longer know us. What legacy will we then have? Those of us aged on the outside - those of us aging at pace within?"

"Marion," Geis attempted to recall her to herself, hoping that she might re-gather her composure before anyone noticed. "You forget yourself." There was the hint of intimacy to his whisper. "You speak as though you were one of these Islanders. As though their cares were your own." His face had lost its placidity, a wrinkle introduced to his brow. He wondered if the evening's excitement (and wine) were perhaps proving too much for her after her near-monastic life of late.

"Yes," she stonily agreed with him, letting her voice drop back to within her chest as she saw that her outburst had done no good, produced no effect. "I am but holidaying here these last four years, carefree and unattached to the problems of the locals."

But her near-diatribe _had_ caught the psychic's attention, no performer wishing to be potentially upstaged by one within the audience not in on the act.

"Predictions!" Tyr announced with an odd-sounding clap of his half-hands, "The Voices call for the sharing of predictions! Whom present shall Their energies center upon?"

Marion was momentarily distracted by the feeling of someone taking up the position of standing directly behind her chair. She half-glanced down, without moving her head, and saw to her right one of Clem's cufflinks glint in the darkness.

When she brought her eyes back toward the stage, she realized Tyr was standing, in mock impatience, at their table.

"The _ex_-quisite Lady Marion," he announced to the audience, which applauded her. "Having grown more mysterious and enigmatic in her time away from us, no doubt. The Spirits," he declared, leaning in to the very small round table, his voice falling into a queer range that mimicked the sharing of a confidence, but was clearly audible to all present, "choose _you_." 'You' was like a voiceless whisper, as he moved to grasp her left hand from where it had sat upon the table.

"A great mis-placer of rings, the Lady Marion." He held up two fingers high above his head: one real, the other his permanently curved wooden thumb. "Two lost, the Spirits know. Yet _one_ on its way back to her. Across an ocean as blue as sapphire." He threw his arm out as though imitating the ocean's waves. "But what is this? She has not waited for its return - she wears another, a jewel-less band - "

Tyr never quite took hold of her hand. She did not voluntarily lift it toward him. What were left of his natural fingers had extended to take her hand in his (always gloved), the prosthetic wooden ones holding to their permanent, petrified arches and bends, producing an unsettling effect.

His second hand came to join his first in the practiced (and effective) illusion that he would receive further information from the Spirits beyond about the future of Marion Nighten. But instead of his gloved appendages contacting her skin - the true conduit (he had always asserted) between his Gifts and another's essence - the tip of one of his still-live fingers extended to caress the very plain, very unusual band upon her finger that even more unusually, underneath, did not fully encircle the base of her digit.

* * *

Joss Tyr took in his breath, but in this action, there was no stagecraft. His eyes tried to convince him the dark light of the cabaret (the light into which he sometimes felt he had been born, like a mole, or other below-ground dwelling creature) that he was mistaken. But he could not mistake the familiar aura emanating from that particular piece of brass. It was Avia's. _Beyond question, beyond doubt_.

What it was doing bent from its true shape and affixed to the hand of the Lady Marion Nighten who occupied the table (and affections, and likely, _bed_) of SS Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer, he had no immediate way of knowing - his second sight was quite silent on this matter.

It had been his plan all along to use the evening's farewell performance to pull the greatest stunt of his show business career. For he was in no particular hurry (unlike his benefactor - and ignorant-of-it enemy) to yet abandon the island Guernsey. His own, terrifying, shocking collapse before show's end, he had planned for the better part of two weeks. What was to be the inciting cause he had never quite fully settled upon.

Here, at Gisbonnhoffer's table, his finger extended toward touching the lost item of the single thing in the world that he (if he loved anything at all) loved best, he had hardly needed to rely on the earlier practice, as he clutched his heart and brought his hands toward his temples as though he could no longer bear the weight of his Gift. He was no longer even certain that he was faking in that moment. It was all he could do not to shout his beloved dove's name, along with publicly declaring the Lady Marion her obvious killer. (Would not anyone else think so of a person going about wearing _their_ vanished lover's jewelry?)

He swooned, he half-choked, his head thrown back as one about to enter a convulsion.

Remnants of confetti shook down unbidden, as if from out of thin air. A smoke bomb misfired, engulfing a distant corner of the room in heavy fog. At a nearby table the centerpiece burst, injudiciously, into flame.

The electric house and stage lights flickered as if the space had transformed into an impromptu haunted house, then went out entirely. Only the muted candle lights at each table remained glowing.

As he fell to the floor, Joss Tyr let out a sound untranslatable by any language known or unknown upon the earth, and chaos erupted.

* * *

**Barnsdale - Carriage House -** Allen Dale had been more than surprised to see, upon exiting the carriage house flat, that Eleri Vaiser was nowhere to be found.

Swiftly (never over-certain of the erratic girl's motivations), he lengthened his stride to bring himself to the house proper, and then up the numerous steps toward her now-preferred lodging of the family nursery.

His mind was, for once, he thought, pristinely clear. The opportunity for the release of the long bottled-up emotion inside of him in his confrontation with the constable, Rowan, had afforded him a wakeful lucidity he had not had the opportunity to experience very often since beginning his double-agent's work as Kommandant's driver, his days more often filled with swallowing his own truth, overlooking (or having to intentionally treat lightly) the horrors which the Alderney camps perpetually held, the wicked depravity of the Kommandant's never-ending schemes and orders. In this unaccustomed moment of clarity, Allen fully expected to be greeted as a returning hero when he swung wide Barnsdale's double nursery doors.

That proved a mistake. He saw in an instant that Eleri had been crying, most vigorously. And also that she was holding a gun - on him.

"I hate you," she said, from her spot sitting among the mussed sheets in her child's bed, heels driven into the mattress, the ancient pistol so heavy she had to prop up her hands' holding of it between her two, elevated knees. "Is it you he has sent? _You_ come to teach me my lesson?"

"Who?" Allen asked, not following, not certain a pistol of such great age would fire reliably (assuming she knew how to pack and load such an antique), but not interested in taking the chance.

"My father!" she sobbed out, her usually sharp and hawkish eyes now like runny watercolors, wet and red and blurry to look at. "He swore if I did not behave he would send one of his men - like Gisbonnhoffer's Thered to - to - to - "

"To hurt you?"

Vigorously she shook her head in the negative. Even through her tears he could see past, to her eyes, that 'to chaperone you' was not the correct answer. He calculated in her recent move from her more-accessible, less-nearby-the-ever-present-staff rooms.

"To...rape you?" he asked, his tone bordering on incredulous. "His own daughter?" It was a leap, after all, from not caring for your own child, to actively seeking to plan their own violent sexual assault.

"What do _you_ care?" she challenged him, and for a moment he thought she might put down the pistol and fly at him all nails and kicking feet again. "You don't want me to be happy! You think only of your position!" And then she did throw the gun aside, onto the matching bed. "Tonight was meant to be the most special of my life. And I'd finally found someone on these cursed islands to share it with and - "

In the absence of the firearm, Allen felt confident enough to reach into his chauffeur's coat and pull out the revenge note Rowan had been crafting. He held it out toward the weeping Eleri, and waited for her to read it for herself.

"'Found it on him earlier today," he told the top of her bent head. "Took me a minute when I read it an hour or so ago to put it together with your new interest in French erotica..."

In her hands, the paper shortly wilted much like her own, no-longer-defiant posture. "But we were in love. He loved me," with that she raised her head. "We were going to be together. We shared something! Something special," in wake of the note, her denial was losing steam. "I was going to - "

"No, Ellie," Allen spoke to her with a shake of his head, his tone neither soft nor understanding, only, truthful. "'at's not love."

"Well, then what is?" she questioned him, some of her old sting creeping back into her voice, expecting him to know the correct answer, if he could call hers out as false.

At the nature of the question, the impracticality of her asking it to him, he responded (not without a level of derision to match her sting), "_I'm_ no anthropologist, no Miss Lonely Hearts. Whyever would you look to _me_ to show you summat like that?"

They froze there for a moment, her face half-looking of someone desperate for a comprehensible answer to her question, his of disbelief at her asking it, until his mind snapped to, and he broke the moment (and the conversation) by walking over to collect the pistol, partway between feeling foolish and feeling relieved to discover that it was only a child's play toy (doubtless, a young Clem Nighten's) after all.

* * *

**Cabaret Alstroemeria -** The Cabaret exploded into chaos, with their table at the very enter of it. Somewhere in that moment Robin had slipped away, left his post at her back. Marion did not even see exactly when, nor how, but when she looked to him he was not there.

Geis and a multitude of other officers had sprung forward, each eager to assist the OberAdmiral's particular pet in his deep, possibly mystical swoon.

"No!" they heard Prinzer, their commander, himself in the fray, cry with powerful force against their offered help. "Do not touch him! Not with your flesh! Gloves, _gloves_, I say, on every one of you. As you see, his mind - his Gift - is overly susceptible to human contact. You will all overpower him!"

And so, in the general rush of every officer applying their (always tucked into their uniform belts') gloves, Marion herself managed to get free of the further impending chaos, and make her way to the somewhat more open air of the (now empty, as everyone present was consumed with the drama of Tyr) ladies washroom.

"I say, Sir," she overheard Geis at trying to advise the near-distraught OberAdmiral - to impress him, "the closest bed is surely through commandeering Ginny Glasson's second-floor flat for his care, for as long as he needs it. It is only a few steps across the stage-door alley to her shop's rear door, I am told. And if I recall from her file, Glasson herself has some background in the nursing arts." Geis paused in faux-consideration for the still lightly moaning Tyr, "if you think he might be up to such a move, however brief."

She had reached the short hallway toward the loos, and turned down it to make the familiar turning into the ladies', when she felt the presence of someone following her. Someone far too near for her comfort. The candlelit sconces in the short hallway were dim, as was the Cabaret's lightning on the whole left low in order to create a certain mood, a reminder of the darkish, below street-level nightlife of Berlin.

She thought of a handbag - of how she had not been given one for the night, and so could not depend upon its weight (nor its potential contents) to aid her in that moment. Bereft that, she began to bend down and remove a shoe, certain the sturdy heel would do her some good when wielded in her hand.

_Too late_. He had her swung about, back to the wall, a mere single step away from the washroom door.

There was no moment available for repartee, for him to tell her that he had noticed the scent of their day together had been washed away and replaced by artificial perfumes and oils paid for by her Jerry lieutenant. And that he didn't like it. That he missed the lack of it. Missed the scent they two somehow created together.

Time only to press his mouth onto her, hungry as a man made to only _look_ at his dinner for hours without being allowed to touch it, much less taste it.

She answered him back, the moment's shock at her pursuer being him causing her to respond to his own intensity two-fold.

"I shall come later this night," he whispered into her mouth, referring to his visiting the Nightwatch, as he, of necessity, had to pull shortly away.

"Yes," she agreed, her own mouth speaking back into his, her heart wild with the jeopardy inherent in that moment. "You will," she relished the creation of a double entendre. "_Several_ times."

He stepped back from her, and though she sighted no one in their immediate vicinity, she brought her hand back and slapped him with force across the face.

He accepted the slap, his eyes widening and contracting at the conclusion of it, as though it truly had stunned him.

"You _ass_!" she declared, loud enough that anyone might hear her reprimand.

Which perfectly expressed both her opinion of any presumptuous garcon who might think he could take such physical liberties with a Cabaret guest (much less a Lady) - and of the man she had married, that night playing it so dangerously - _and for what, really?_ - so perilously close to the edge.

* * *

**SARK - nearby La Salle's tenement -** Stoker was, again, abundantly thankful for the dark, for all that it made his compass-reading troublesome. He had in his possession the rough coordinates (as given in several coded Nightwatch broadcasts) of the unit's makeshift HQ on this island.

He was tired - and somewhat wet - from his sea-to-shore journey. More like, sea-to-cliff, or sea-to-cave. He had found (less easily than he had expected) the one chosen out for him by Legg's learned consulting of the various maps, and made happy use of its unlikely hidden space within for stowing the boat and several key items, that he could not reasonably be carrying with him at the moment. He was a stranger here, after all - an entirely unknown face on a small island sure to be quite suspicious of unknown faces at any time, but much more so at the present. The hour was between nine and ten o'clock. Well into the Jerry-imposed curfew after which all residents were required to be (and stay) within doors until morning.

He marveled that in all the distance he had walked, he could still hear the sea, making it hard for him to focus, to not compare the night and this place to any evening when on a jolly seaside holiday.

Early on, nearer to the seaside cliffs, he had passed three houses and several barns on his way, but he had stopped at none. He was interested only in the house meant to be at (if not just close - he doubted these coordinates were spot-on) the location he held numerically in his head. He prayed that he would know how best to approach it, as well as prayed that it would be the exact one sheltering members of the unit.

In the distance he saw a dark shape (blackouts ongoing even here, on Sark), which he took for a house. He quickened his pace, stopping once to consult his compass and do some figuring in his head. This was it. He felt certain.

As he walked toward the front door (so certain he was that he had arrived), he reminded himself of how long the unit had been out of the game. How any SIS-given passwords or secret codes in their possession would now have long been defunct. Of that fact being the very reason he had been sent - that they would each know and trust him on sight - rather than some random British commando bursting in they had never met and could not be sure was not simply a ploy of the enemy to blow whatever covers they had taken for themselves, here.

Like any other reasonable visitor (and because he could think of no other way to go about it), he knocked politely on the front door.

There was some time in an answer coming, during which he had the brief presence of mind to wonder why they did not seem to have a watch posted that would have sighted him. There was nothing else in sight of the farm, no other house or distant outbuilding. There was no way, surely, that the Jerries would have known him to be coming _just_ now, _just_ here. The Nightwatch had run, as usual, the night before - no indication given that anything with the unit had gone awry.

Slowly the door pulled open, strong light shining from behind the person standing there. A woman. Stoker took a moment to count the collection of children behind her. She stood, without speaking, taking in his attire and unfamiliar face from head to toe.

His mind told him he had erred. The coordinates (or his own figuring) had been off. And here he was, standing in this unwitting, Sarkese woman's doorway. Surely if a man were present she would have sent him to answer the door. It was important that she not take him as a threat, which might send her, even now, to the Jerries for aid. It was important that he be allowed into the house. The longer he stayed out in the open the more likely he would be caught. In the brief space of a quarter-second he studied on what to do.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

Her face told him nothing.

As best he could remember from his time in school day pantos, he let himself list a bit, placed one leg behind the other, and dropped into a rather reasonable facsimile of a dead faint.

* * *

Abby Rufford stood at her home's doorway and for a moment surveyed the unknown man who had knocked upon her door after curfew and then shortly, without speaking, swooned and fainted dead away.

Making up her mind, she turned to her eldest son, knowing he could best make the trip, and sent him off to La Salle's as fast as his feet - and discretion - could carry him.

Then she, and two of the girls, grabbed the stranger by his boots (their soles showing surprisingly little wear) and unceremoniously dragged him into the front hall of their home before they re-shut the door behind him.

She had no idea what was going on, but like any mother, she could smell trouble. And this new 'trouble' had the scent of Robin, that handsome, naughty scamp of a man from La Salle's, _all_ over it.

**...TBC...**


	37. Chapter 37

**GUERNSEY - outside Cabaret Alstroemeria -** Gisbonnhoffer scowled with a vengeance. He knew he needed to see Marion home - or back to the place she was currently _calling_ home - at this point in the night, but he also knew that his best bet for further distinguishing himself (and for advancement) was on staying nearby as the ailing Joss Tyr was moved - at his suggestion - and installed into the living quarters above Ginny Glasson's shop across the alley from the Cabaret.

His leaving the scene of such a shrewd triumph of cleverness in front of the OberAdmiral could lead to its easily being claimed - or exploited - by another officer in the bustle and inherent confusion that would follow.

He looked at the very few vehicles (cars - and those permitted to drive them - a rarity here) lining the street, waiting patiently (and with no expectation when they might choose to exit) to collect their owners. Like them, the Kommandant's driver was also meant to be here, waiting for the evening's entertainment to conclude. Of course, the show had been unexpectedly cut short by Tyr's out-of-nowhere collapse. But still.

Nearly ten minutes passed before the irritating Mr. Allen appeared with the Kommandant's car.

Geis turned his glower to the man now getting out from behind the wheel. "You have taken yourself off to Sumarez Street, no doubt," he sneered at the man, reaching out to remove several long, dark hairs that had become entangled in the brass buttons of the chauffeur uniform's coat.

As Geis referenced the well-known address of the brothel run by-and-for-Jerries on the island, Allen did not miss the look of distaste that momentarily flooded the face of Marion, but found himself uncertain as to its root cause. Either she was disgusted with such unfit-for-a-lady's-ears subject being discussed so openly and indecorously in front of her (in which case her distaste was firmly with Geis), or she had taken offense at the idea that he had attended upon such a place (in which case, naughty him).

Well, he could have told her, had she asked, that he for one took no pleasure in the company of a girl who couldn't say no, and that further (unlike the un-observant eyes of Herr Geis), _he_ well knew every girl housed down on Sumarez to be a bottle blonde.

The darkness of the lengths of hair Gisbonnhoffer had pulled from his uniform should have been an immediate indication that he had been anywhere but Sumarez. _But_, as Allen was keen to keep his actual altercation with both Eleri and the Island constable well under wraps, he gladly accepted both Gisbonnhoffer's rebuke, and Marion's censure, not bothering to set either of them right.

* * *

As they drove into the night, navigating the rural stretches of the road to Barnsdale by only moonlight due to the blackout, Gisbonnhoffer attempted to compensate for missing a further chance to make an impression with his ultimate superior on the Islands by warming himself with the thought of the confidence Prinzer had placed in his canny suggestion, and by wondering: might he be able to maneuver around Vaiser (rather than through him), and manage to gain favor (and perhaps even a position) with Prinzer directly?

* * *

Marion Nighten sat in the car next to her inescapable Jerry lieutenant, and marveled that even now, in his quietest moment, at his least talkative, she carried within her the odd feeling that she could understand his mood. They had lived closely with one another for nearly four years, now.

He was not - never was - an effusive man. Words were not his strength. She had in the past often found this a great encouragement - that in addition to sharing his company, she rarely had to also share his articulated thoughts. But even so, she had learned his moods, his body language and his small habits, as one is bound to do.

He sat, head and even body tilted away from her, toward window and door, his long legs ever needing to be off to the side in smaller spaces such as this. But as a rule he faced his knees toward her, not like now, where they rested nearly against the door's handle, his chin inclined toward the glass as though he studied the various levels of black in the passing landscape.

He had not spoken aloud for some minutes.

"You are upset," she announced.

"I'm fine," he replied, and she could almost see his fingers tense in their spot settled upon his thigh. "Let us not discuss it."

She could not see much in only the moonlight, and him in a black suit, but her eyes slid toward him nonetheless as she issued something of a challenge. "I had imagined the man that still so zealously seeks out my company would no longer shut me out of his thoughts."

Rather than rising to the occasion and opening himself up to her, he chose to apologize. "Forgive me, Marion," he told her, his eyes not meeting hers, but still fixed somewhere out the automobile's window. "At present I'm not very good company."

"Has the Kommandant angered you?"

"No," and here his tone took on a certain tartness. "The Kommandant undermines me whenever possible. That's not unusual." He gave a half-sigh, on the exhale, and nearly under his breath adding, "...just like with the fisherman."

Her brain lit up like neon in a sign at his words. "What's that?" She tried not to pounce on the word 'fisherman' too eagerly, and scare away whatever he might share with his guard down, share without thinking.

_Had Allen heard? _

_No._ The sound-muffling curtain was pulled closed between the auto's rear seat and the driver's, and Geis had decidedly been speaking under his breath.

She waited for him to answer her query. Tried to maintain the disinterest in her posture.

His jaws locked, emphasizing the sharp sloping of his chin, but he spoke through it. "I am only recalling how your kidnap and rescue, the escape and capture of the flyer, was _my_ project, and the Kommandant took it away from me."

He let out something between a huff and a scoff. "Smoothly, trickily, and from under my nose." And here his tone returned to one of put-on boredom. "As he does with so very many things."

She nearly caught her breath at this statement. It was unlike Geis to criticize his betters, in particular Vaiser. She reminded herself that he had drunk rather more wine tonight than he might usually do on such an occasion. She hoped by staying silent he might say more, but she saw his eyes go toward the curtain (imperfectly) cutting off Allen in the front seat from overhearing them, and with a stamp of his foot against the floorboards, he seemed to have ended his confessional. "I have overspoken. Again, forgive me, Marion," he asked her, and his lips almost smiled, though grimly. "I am not myself."

"I rather think you more yourself than usual," she dissented, a studied crease between her brows.

At this, his eyes finally came up to hers, seeking them out among the blackness of the car's interior. He settled onto them, in no hurry to look away, undistracted by the nighttime scenery they passed by, or by her beguiling frock, and she let him search there within her eyes for what he could, let him find what he might - hiding (or visible) - there in the depths of herself, knowing enough about this man to hate him. To more than once have wished him dead. And yet, contradictorily knowing enough as to (insofar as some things) understand what there was to be understood about him.

* * *

He had dismissed the driver, Mr. Allen, outside the boundaries of the Barnsdale estate, realizing that Marion would not willingly venture even beyond the outermost gates of her family's estate, after her earlier declaration to him. Together they had watched and listened as the car disappeared within the borders of this, one of the few still well-kept homes and grounds on the islands entire.

A brief walk (though clumsier for Marion in her heels than he would have expected), and they were at the edge of Mr. Thornton's very meager lawn.

* * *

Marion felt a certain degree of relief, largely confident that there was next to no chance Geis had any desire to lay himself down _here_, among the dirty peasantry, among the semi-barnyard and crude cottage that stood for a home - even if it were to mean bedding her. No, if that's what his next move was, she was confident they would at present be standing somewhere more plush, with carpets and clean linens; something to drink, and food for...later.

"Forgive me," her own words surprised her, as she unexpectedly echoed his apologetic tone from before. "I am very tired," wishing to conclude their time together, and indeed, needing to get free of him in time to make the Nightwatch.

"Yes," he agreed with her, his mood, if not changed, then at least submerged as he brought his hands toward her in an embrace surely they both knew she had no way of rejecting, and kissed her mouth.

As he kissed her, he brought the back of his hand and knuckles to feather across the side of her face. Less engaged in the act than he, her eyes opened to see his fingers, his palm, and a shiver ran through her that she could neither stop, nor lessen.

There, in the cabaret's low light, that hand - Geis' hand - extended toward Robin, a match between its fingers lit for the fag already between her risk-taking husband's lips.

As anyone might in accepting such a light, Robin reached for Gisbonnhoffer's palm to steady and guide the end of the cigarette toward it, and to prevent himself from getting burned. A common gesture, a social gesture. On any night one might see it a thousand times. Less invested with significance than the 'how-do-you-do' handclasp of hello.

_Robin's hand_, his once-broken finger unable to match the curl of the rest of his grip. The hand of the man she once knew, of a certainty, was about to kill Thomas Carter - over her.

_Geis' hand_, holding the match - the igniter - toward a man he would gladly see tortured and killed, had he but known whom he was. _The hand of her enemy. Of Robin's enemy_. The hand that killed Mitch. The nails smoothly shaped in the salon. The fingers long, as the shanks of a tall man (which Geis was) would be. His touch cool, tending always toward detached. A hand that made nothing. A hand that destroyed.

God created the world in six days, rested on the seventh. And on the eighth day, Robin loved Mitch. Then, and forever. And here Robin was, cruelly tangled in an unwitting gesture of magnanimity with Mitch's killer, just as she was now tangled in the same man's amorous, adulterous embrace.

Clem had once, showing off, tied her a knot - a Turk's head. For sport, he had challenged her to undo it. She had tried and tried to separate the strands from one another, to pull them apart. To no avail. In the end, in a fit of temper and frustration, she had grabbed for his knife and slit them everyone, until the many sections lay there no longer in a cohesive, continuous string, no longer connected in any way, but cut, fraying, and of far less use than before.

Would it also cost _them_ so much? To free themselves from this third man caught against their will, against their desire, who had woven himself into their own, inseparable tangle?

"You know, '_nachkuss_'?" Geis asked her, under his breath between kisses. "A word for all the kisses that have yet to be named? To me there is '_marionkuss_'. A word for all the kisses that have been lost, and must needs be made up for."

She felt Gisbonnhoffer's hand drop to the netting of her dress, felt his fingertips cascade down along the embroidery until he found the bodice, and, still kissing her, clutched at the fabric, and what there was of her within it. His fingertips extended to the top of the solid fabric, and tried to make their way down, behind it - only to be frustrated by the well-attached netting which proved a barrier to his present desire.

Giving up a frontal assault, he brought his hands around to her bared back, where the barring netting extended only minimally beyond her shoulders. Here he found an opening to plunge his hungry fingers between the dress and her skin, snaking their way below her arm and around to her side.

Their embrace was very close now.

But try as he might, his arm would extend no further between the fabric and her skin, and at best, his fingertips found only the beginning side swell of her breast, and were left, in their travels, unsated.

* * *

"Lady Marion? Is that you?" came a voice, clearly of the old man. It was half-timid, and firmly (due to curfew) located _within_ the cottage.

Marion pulled away to respond, but before her words were fully said, Geis brought the hand that had been warmed by her own flesh up to her chin where he held her, though lightly, and without the need of force.

"I will come again," he told her. "But next time, when we drink this _liebestrank_ - this love potion - I think...I think we will not stay here."

She neither nodded nor disagreed, but did take a step back to relieve her chin of his grip.

"Goodnight, then, Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer," she said, her head slightly a-tilt as she made to take the short walk to the cottage door.

He reached to try and grab at her arm or hand to turn her for one final moment, but she was too quickly out of easy range. "Geis," he asked of her, and perhaps it was the trees, or the soft ground under his feet, or even the tranquil moon shining down on them, but there was no edge to his voice, no demand as he asked, "please, Geis."

She turned back, but only for a moment, capitulating with a nod, but without saying the name.

* * *

Of course she had known his timetable would be far accelerated now. There was something absurd, Marion supposed, about a man more or less telling you that the next time you met would be in the bed of his choosing, and yet you withholding the use of his first name.

_Very well_.

"Geis," she agreed with him.

* * *

He no longer recalled the earlier upsetting possibility of further missed opportunity back in St. Peter Port. In his mind there was little room left for anything but stars, and the further promise of the heavens beyond.

* * *

**Nightwatch Windmill -** It had not proven impossible to arrive in time for the broadcast. But neither had there been much time to properly thank Thornton for his assistance in shooing away Geis. Marion had changed her clothes so quickly in the darkened cottage she had not even taken time to find a modest corner to do so. The night itself had proven all the cloak of modesty she needed.

Just as it had concealed what she was sure would have been the relief in Thornton's eyes that she had not only been returned safely back to his cottage on that night (she knew he had harbored some doubts that she would be), but also that he need not fret over supplying her a parcel of ever-more hard-to-locate nibbles to carry her through her nighttime trek to the windmill and radio transmission.

She had eaten at the Cabaret. She had accomplished at least that much this night: a filled belly that would have to carry her through who knew how many future meals where enough (much less 'plenty') and satisfaction were both chronically in short supply.

* * *

Of late she had found herself growing somewhat impatient with her own selection of records. She had not bought music since the Occupation began, nearly four years ago. Not bought it, nor, usually, been able to hear it. There were the _verboten_ selections overheard on BBC Radio, though they were more often classical than popular.

In a way, like the Occupation, her record collection froze the world, within it time (at least forward-running time) petrified and held its shape like amber. Benny Goodman had never had another hit record. Bing Crosby, Hildegarde, no longer saw the insides of recording studios. July, 1940: with the Nazis, the death of music. More and more she felt here she only managed, for the Islanders - for herself - to play and air its extended eulogy.

And her collection - despite its (once, she thought) impressive size - was showing wear. She guarded and tended the black disks as zealously as any mother bear, and yet - occasional scratches happened. Grooves grew over-deep, threatening to distort the sound from over-playing. The constant fear of warping or - don't even think it - shattering from their current, crude warehousing here in the windmill's damp, semi-earthen half-cellar.

She wondered if they would be seen as museum pieces now, back at home. Drifted away from popularity, no longer the artists, the tunes or tempos Londoners wished any longer to hear, to dance to.

She would ask Robin, then, grill him on it good. If he had been in London (as he had said) as recently as February '43 he would know, might even be able to tell her some of the newest recordings. But she would not ask him to sing them - no. She found herself giving a shallow smirk. She could not, after all, expect her precious husband to excel at _everything_.

She set the needle down on Rogers and Hart's "Manhattan," a song she rarely played, as it reminded her of Freddy singing it - and, she knew (though at the time she had tried _not_ to know) _meaning_ it, _hoping_ for it.

How different a feeling it gave her, how different was her enjoyment of it, casting instead herself and Robin in the roles of 'boy and girl'.

"_We'll go to Yonkers/Where true love conquers/In the wilds./And starve together, dear,/In Childs'./We'll go to Coney/And eat baloney/On a roll./In Central Park we'll stroll,/Where our first kiss we stole,/Soul to soul_."

But then, Robin had never seen Manhattan - much less been to America, and they studiously (well, at least _she_ studiously) avoided future plans. The making or the imagining of them. She strongly suspicioned he might, might make them. She knew, at least, that he did not see the war as she did: neverending, unwinnable. Knew that _he_ did not doubt one day the islands would be free and she and he free to leave them if they wished.

They spoke of tomorrow, sometimes, but only ever in 'the day immediately following today'. On rare occasion they had reason to discuss something a week away. But that was not so different from any Islander, really. One never spoke of next year - even farmers who had all their life had their mind tuned to next year's harvest. What could next year bring? Two years? A decade? Even, a fortnight? Best not to borrow tomorrow's troubles today.

Daydreaming, castles in the air - these were things for celluloid lovers projected on cinema screens.

And maybe, just maybe when she was all alone, without Robin to catch her out at doing it, things for the woman who was the Nightwatch to allow herself - if only for the length of a song - to spin girlishly for her own - if acknowledged, brief - pleasure.

"_Our future babies/We'll take to "Abie's/Irish Rose."/I hope they'll live to see/It close./The city's clamor can never spoil/The dreams of a boy and goil./We'll turn Manhattan/Into an isle of joy_."

The record turned, obediently, the song playing on. She took out her pocket handkerchief and attempted an impromptu polish of the table-top chrome microphone, trying to shine it so that at least the barest glint of the lantern she had with her might shine off its surface.

As ever, conscious of how much of the song was left to play out, she foolishly considered her sudden desire for a pickle - several jars still housed here among her now meager supplies. An irresponsible thought, really. After the sumptuous array she had, only now mere hours ago, feasted upon, she had no business raiding a pickle jar, whose contents she would need to depend upon far more in days to come.

Still, not entirely convinced, and her reliably nocturnal appetite piqued, she rose from her seat and walked toward the snugly packed corner of the half-cellar, leaving her back to the rickety wooden steps and only-access door.

She could not have said what it was that caused her to turn about, what change in the air or noise she might have sensed that propelled her to do so.

A second before turning to meet...whatever, she paused, her eyes in the low light making an inventory of what was about her that might prove useful, her mind announcing, with disappointment, that her 'just-in-case' pistol was at least three (far too) long steps to the left.

A man, who was decidedly _not_ Robin, stood between two half-ancient wooden support beams that held up much of the remaining roof (and therefore the floor of the windmill proper above), and stood as the terminus for what was left of the two largely-rotten railings that bordered the stairs. He was dressed from head-to-boot in the uniform of His Majesty's Royal Army, spotless as a cadet turning out for his first official review on the parade grounds.

The sight of this impossibility took her breath as certainly as had the angel Gabriel presented himself at her windmill.

His hair was dark, though difficult to gauge in its depth and tone due to the surrounding darkness. His jaw tended toward square, though not sharply so. His cheekbones were satisfyingly high, and well-complimented both his nose and brow. His skin was of such a smooth, perfected consistency that he showed no beard whatsoever, despite his age belying that.

The only thing that detracted from his overall appearance of polish-and-shine was that, even in the darkness, she caught the hint of long shadows below his eyes (which themselves were hard to look away from), shadows she felt sure upon sighting that she was not meant to have discerned, much less decoded. Something within her (something of herself that more than understood such shadows) told her that they were deep, bone-etched (though such was anatomically impossible), unmappable caverns at the base of the mind-dazzling waterfalls that were his eyes.

This was the sort of man you found yourself (against all better judgment) drawn to at a dinner party, or, in the interest of self-preservation, learned quickly to avoid.

Still at quantifying his eyes, she failed to immediately register the revolver he held on her.

"The Lady Marion Nighten," his voice was like warm chocolate, thickly coating whatever it touched. His accent perfection: he could have announced for BBC. "You have been found guilty of treason, collusion, collaboration, consorting with the enemy, and _murder_." The waterfalls became wild torrents, more foam than crystal water. "Prepare now to accept the justice of those you betrayed as it will be meted out to you."

* * *

Even at the top of the windmill's cellar stairs where he had stopped short upon realizing Marion was not alone, Robin Oxley heard the pistol cock - sounding like a thousand other pistol cocks he himself had enacted - or had enacted upon him.

He felt for his own sidearm, cursing soundlessly that due to the steep slant of the stair and the low-hung cellar ceiling, without risking a descent of at least five (sure to creak) steps, the best he could even see to aim at was arse and Achilles' tendons. Hardly a solid way to stop a man from taking his shot. His shot at Marion.

He held his breath, determined not to make a sound, wondering how long he dared risk Marion before he would be compelled to interfere - and praying that he would not miscalculate such a time, nor waste it when it arrived.

* * *

Unconcernedly, its volume just loud enough to be heard a foot - no more - beyond the cellar door, the Nightwatch and its song cycled on, out into the Guernsey night. "_And in the station house we'll end,/But Civic Virtue cannot destroy/The dreams of a girl and boy./We'll turn Manhattan/Into an isle of joy!_"

**...TBC...**


	38. Chapter 38

**1943 - GUERNSEY - two weeks before the Barnsdale engagement party of the Lady Marion Nighten and SS Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer -** "Hush, Allen, _hush_!" Mitch hissed, as usual, never one to employ harsh language even when it might prove useful. He placed his hand on his brother-in-arms' chest, as if to prevent him from advancing. "_I_ will tell him."

"Well if'n it's easier -" Dale cut in with a familiar shrug, "I don't mind bearin' the bad tidings."

"I'll do it in a heartbeat," Royston offered, "I've no nevermind in the whole mess."

"Yeah," Allen cracked, injecting black humor to the sore subject of Royston's errant wife. "'All but written a book on female betrayal, after all, ain't ye?"

Somewhat bemused by the entire unit's quibbling over who it was to carry Robin the day's bad news, Wills Reddy verbally prodded at Johnson. "What ho, John, will you not offer your services - put your name in for the draw - as well?"

Johnson looked up like a man who had only just discovered he'd sat on a tack, but was too prideful to rise up and admit the pain it was causing him. "I've never been one to understand women," John offered, though he knew himself to be a man who wholly appreciated (yearned for, even) their gentle, domestic ways, "much less men in love with women." He looked sheepishly uncomfortable at this confession. "I'll not stick my own neck out here. Not with so many others willing to volunteer."

"I _said_, I'll go," Mitch re-asserted, his tone growing sharp. "It's Robin and Marion, after all. Nothing you great muttonheads would know square one about."

"Now, see," Royston piped up, his coarse voice unintentionally ironic, "Bonchurch's gone and set me to thinking about a nice sandwich of cold, thick mutton..."

* * *

**Present Time - Nightwatch Windmill -** "You ought to worry," the man with the pistol on her warned with a slight shake of his head as he spoke. "I won't make it quick."

"This isn't what you want to do," Marion tried to stall him. "To kill a woman - a non-combatant - when your grievance is clearly with the Germans. It isn't what His Majesty would wish."

A bitter laugh, rough and perilous as un-sanded lumber came up from his throat. "No," he agreed. "His Majesty, _King_ George, would just as soon forget these Islands. _And_ His people."

"Perhaps," she acquiesced, herself usually sharing in some of this chap's irritation. "But He would not wish His _people_ to forget one another." But as she said this, she let her eyes for the first time stray down to the pistol, where he held it in a double-grip. It was then she realized she was not speaking to one of His Majesty's soldiers at all. The gloved hands that (attempted) to close around the gun were awkward, and ill-formed for the task. It was, in fact, the left middle finger that gracelessly (and potentially ineffectually) rested upon the trigger.

Her eyes shot back up to re-appraise the uniform, noting now that it was devoid of rank insignia, patches, or ribbons of any kind. It was a blank.

And she had seen its like before, here, since the Occupation. As a costume used in the show of the psychic Joss Tyr.

She did not question that she had not recognized him: she had never encountered him without his stage make-up, the wild, unnatural colors streaked through his flamboyant hair. She took no time to wonder where his facial scars were now - assuming they lay, as always, deeply masked by a layer of (this time) flesh-colored cosmetics.

With a micro-squint of his right eye, she saw that he knew himself to be discovered.

"You are really quite handsome," she told him.

"And you are, patently, _not_," he told her, almost blithely, walking to circle over toward the running turntable. "Disloyal women rarely are."

She found herself circling also, her back now to the stairs, and (unknown to her) to Robin beyond it, Marion now blocking him from taking his shot.

"It is said," she offered, "- and you, yourself have confirmed it - that you are a Count," she began, "who became an officer, and in a Todt explosion lost much of himself. As well as his position." She let her eyes again take in his uniform. "Who, then, are you at being now?"

"I am what I have been made," he told her, hoping she knew that just because his hands held the gun insecurely, did not mean his aim would prove untrue, "an instrument of revenge." The waterfalls that were his eyes froze over. "_I_ am the Whichman."

* * *

**1943 - GUERNSEY - two weeks before the Barnsdale engagement party of the Lady Marion Nighten and SS Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer -** "What news, then, Mitch?" Robin had given his usual greeting to his longtime friend and fellow officer. They were bivouacked within view of the coast, though far enough from inlet or beach to avoid immediate detection. The camp, of direst necessity, had been slap-dash in the making, and remained nothing they could not easily tear-down and reassemble in a flash - as would likely be necessary, as since their seeking refuge from their hulled ship on the island of Guernsey they had been the perpetual, prospective quarry of what seemed like every Jerry occupying this Channel Island region.

"She is here," was all that he had said to Mitch's declaration that the Lady Marion Nighten was at present a known resident of Guernsey, Mitch's voice dry, his throat as though half-choked on sand or grit.

"Her father had a house here," Robin recalled aloud, unimportantly, his mind stuttering through its paces at the news. _Marion_, Marion who had gone to America, somehow _here_. Marion, probably the sole person he would wish to speak with before he died (both legally and actually). Marion, whose face hung in the sky above him at night, occluding the North Star. Over-mapping any constellations one was meant to steer by. Marion, whose smallest gesture haunted him, whose bloody pigheadedness had, in its circuitous way, brought him here.

"_Yeees_," Mitch agreed with his declaration. "Sir Edward is here as well. Oh," for a moment he brightened. "Dale got work. Which is how the news came to us."

"Us?"

"Well," he put his hand out in a 'so-so' motion, "the unit. They are not at all pleased with it, I might tell you."

"Pleased with what?" Robin asked, his brows clashing together like two Spitfires in a dogfight. "What is another abandoned Briton to them," he shrugged, "another caught under the thumb of the Reich, here?"

"Well that's just it, isn't it?" Mitch went on, "Allen reports that she and her father are entertaining Jerries at their estate, most every week-end. And that Marion -" he caught himself here, knowing he had coarsely backed into saying what he had started out to say more fluidly. He swallowed uncomfortably. "Marion is..._entangled_...with one of their Alderney officers."

Robin's eyes shot up to Mitch's, his face blanched. But his voice betrayed none of his shock. "And so the lads take issue with this."

"With their very forthcoming-about-his-love-life superior now being the well-known paramour of a Nazi collaborator?" Mitch had not known how much he would now wish Robin had been able to keep his mouth shut all those dark nights 'round a fire, spinning tales of Marion Nighten's perfection to his mates and men. His pre-Island behavior certainly made their present situation a rather more complicated one. "Well, they are hardly in the mood to stand you a round of drinks upon consideration of the notion."

Robin heard his friend listing the obstacles his previous openness about Marion was causing them. He thought of it himself. _Had_ he spun her into a fantasy? Something faery-like that vanished with the dawn? It had been nearly five years since they had spoken, much less laid eyes on one another. What if, in that time, she had made him into a villain - or worse yet, written him off as simply a mistake she had easily gotten over?

"And what if they are right?" Robin asked aloud. "Times change us, Mitch. Would you have ever imagined a world where you would have agreed to let your own dear mother think you dead - no matter what was at stake?"

"Or in which I would count Dale among my bosom friends?" Mitch added quietly to himself and then scoffed. "'Perhaps they are right?'" he quoted Robin loudly, wagging his head in an exaggerated motion. "'Perhaps they are right?' What know they of you - of, of Robin Oxley as was? What know they of Marion? _Your_ Marion? You will let them dictate whether you go and see her - whether you any longer will trust her?" Mitch could hardly figure out what to do with his hands, such was his state of agitation. "This is insanity."

Robin's reply was quiet, reasoned, and resolute. "She left me, Mitch. You were there - she chose the horse. After that, how could I ever claim to know her well again?" His demeanor began to spiral back into that of the black cloud that had persisted around him in the days following Marion's sailing on the oceanliner to America.

Mitch marched with noisy-in-the-undergrowth steps closer toward Robin. "You _know_ her. I know her," Mitch fought against Robin's mounting disillusionment. "For the Lady Marion Nighten to entertain the advances of a Jerry officer - to even tolerate one attending the same soiree as her...why, she would have to have had some large part of her brain - her conscience - her social _principles_ surgically _removed_."

Robin considered this. "They say Geordie Wellington's name was found on the roll list of a German Nationalist sympathizer's society."

This brought Mitch to a sudden halt. "Geord - _who_?"

Again, in off-the-cuff tones. "Some chap that had been paying calls to her just before we..."

"Well she didn't fall in love with Geordie Welling..._zinger_, did she? She didn't promise to marry _him_. She didn't love _him_ more than earth or sky or air to breathe -"

It was Robin's turn to be suddenly halted. "You think Marion loved me more than earth or breath?"

This was not a topic they two had ever directly addressed. When Robin and Marion had been together, certainly it had not needed to be said. And when she left...it was hardly the right way to console a friend.

Mitch inhaled. "I think she loved you no less than you loved her." Mitch let his declaration sit. "Than you _do_ love her, even now."

"And so I should trust that there's more afoot than what gossip Allen might collect for us?"

So obvious it seemed to him, Mitch did not vocally agree, but rather added to what ought occur next. "And so we should _altogether_ go and see, and learn if she is to be a friendly (of which I am certain she is), or if we have both gravely overestimated her moral fortitude and her overall character (which I wholeheartedly doubt)."

"Even so," Robin reminded the empty space directly in front of him, where he looked out at the sea, "traitor or true, Marion has never been an easy woman. She will not take kindly to being questioned."

"Well," Mitch spoke the word with an inconclusive shrug, "the lads are ready to write her off. And so shall I be, once we part here."

"How is that?" Robin's head snapped back to catch his friend's face. "After such impassioned pleading on her part?"

"It will not do for both of us to stand in her support and defense. It will seem like, like ganging up on them. You know how we've always tried to avoid situations like that."

Robin found himself falling into a smile. "And so you will revert to being dour and doomsday about the prospect that the Lady Marion can be trusted?"

Pushing out his chest like a man trying to imitate pride, Mitch announced, "I shall pattern my feelings on the subject after Wills', which are certain to be no harsher than John's, less cynical than Allen's, and a sight less drastic than Royston's."

"And so I go to battle against my own men over a well-acknowledged-by-them lost cause." It was a summation, not a question.

"Well, yes, but you do outrank us all. Surely there's some comfort in that."

"Damn little, my friend," Robin told him, certain he felt a bruising swell on his heart from where it had leapt at the news of Marion's close proximity, and then fallen, thud-like when Mitch had added the prospect of possible collaboration - possible emotional attachment - with, of all people, the occupying enemy.

* * *

**Present time - Nightwatch Windmill -** "Quick," Joss Tyr, Count Werner von Himmel, the self-christened Whichman laughed without feeling. "That would hardly be fair, would it? As I mean you to suffer. Not likely anyone would find you here, in this out of the way - what would you call it?" He had dropped his well-done British accent, and spoke like himself (at least what she knew of him to be himself).

"Of whose murder do I stand accused?"

"The murder of the only friend I have. You wear her bauble on your finger, _there_."

Marion's eyes narrowed, as her mind tried to understand what he could mean. "And you have followed me here, all the way from Mr. Thornton's?"

"Curious, that," his tone became like that he used in his shows, part sing-song, part teasing. "Is it still proper to call it 'Mr. Thornton's'? When he no longer inhabits this earthly realm?"

"You have...killed him?" Her mind looked back down to the pistol, an errant thought of whether the barrel might still be warm shot out to the forefront of her mind.

"Enough talking," and he wagged the gun at her, "the Whichman killed Mr. Thornton so that Islanders learn. Heﾒs aided you. You, a known collaborator. He died, if only for his faithful tending of you." He smiled without teeth, his eyebrows raised as if to ask, 'whaddya _think_ of that'?

"Are you cert -" and she meant to ask if he were sure Thornton was dead, not merely injured, and in asking it, she made an instinctive initial turn toward the stairs as if to run to her friend and his cottage.

She had meant to explain that the Whichman and she were not so very different. That she played with the Jerries in the day, but lived to spite them in the night, and that he, known by all as the OberAdmiral's special pet, clearly performed some similar Resistance, but the mention of Thornton killed threw her own need for preservation out of her mind.

In the instance of her turning, Robin seized his moment, managing to get off a shot at her captor. His aim proved true, and his bullet hit Tyr firmly in one of the hands that held the pistol, shearing off two fingers, both of which remained in the psychic's glove and flipped back to kiss his knuckles. They had been wood.

"She is the _Nightwatch_, you lunatic simpleton," Robin shouted at Tyr, blazing down the stair, no thought to its half-rotten steps, his gun trained now on far more sensitive parts of the man. "Look around you! Hold you fire!"

Tyr had managed - before Robin's shot caused him to drop his weapon - to get off a single round. Robin had not realized it, the sound falling just so with his own shot that one could not have been distinguished from the other. It was only the vivid color (even in the low lamplight) blooming on the shoulder of the shirt Marion wore that told the tale.

Tyr stood looking about him, (for the first time, it seemed) taking in the cellar's surroundings, the microphone and turntable.

"I had planned to kill you, NightWatchwoman," he said aloud, as if someone in a dream.

"Then you would have done your countrymen's jobs for them," Robin sneered out, trying for a better look at Marion's wound.

She brought her now pale, but steady hand up to his probing one, "it's clean-through, I think," she informed him from where she had half-fallen to the packed-earth floor.

She tried, with his help, to lever herself up using a vertical support beam, but Robin saw the color drain from her face, and her eyes begin to go blank as before a faint, and set her back down again, if somewhat roughly.

"Will it stretch?" he asked her (even while attempting the crudest of triage to her wound) of the microphone cord, knowing she had yet to sign-off from the broadcast.

"Not this distance," she ruefully smiled, her eyelids half-closed. "It is a poorly-constructed location from which to broadcast, or so I've been told," even in her pain and physical stress, she could not help but tease him.

The record was moments from its conclusion.

"Can you make it the distance?" Robin asked, suspecting she could not, yet. "For I've not such a pretty voice as yours."

While they were saying this, they failed to notice - until it was too late to prevent him - that Tyr had stepped toward the microphone, and making use of yet another of his peculiar talents, pitched his voice - not as it had been when he first entered to threaten her, in the round tones of BBC English - (but rather) in a more than reasonable approximation of one Josie Otto, a girl he had never met, in a country he had never visited, and spoke the usual conclusion of the programme: "as long as 'night' has fallen, until oppression ends, the Nightwatch will broadcast freedom to these, our own dear Islands."

It was, perhaps, an imperfect imitation on his part. And yet, accounting for radio static and other interference...shortcomings of homemade crystal receiver sets, the difference between the real Nightwatch and this man, this Whichman, was one only Marion herself was likely ever to perceive.

* * *

There was no real time for either Robin or Marion to register their thoughts about Tyr's last-second substitution aloud. Robin had set to stripping back Marion's blouse in an effort to get a better look at her wound.

Marion had room for only one thing in her crowded mind besides the pain. "He has killed Thornton," she recalled.

Robin threw a half-horrified glance over his shoulder at Tyr, taking in his phony (but convincing) uniform. "And so the last thing a loyal Islander sees is one of His Majesty's own men taking his life?"

Before Tyr could (or had even chosen to) counter Robin's accusation, Marion issued an order of her own. Her voice was controlled and deliberate. "Send. For Allen."

"What? No," Robin disagreed, trying to ignore her harsh intakes of air at his further probing the wound with his fingers. "The fewer that know their way to this place -"

"Send him for Allen," she repeated, indicating Tyr, her sentence choppy with effort. "Have him bring me Eleri. And then go to Thornton's and bury his body," she issued a task for the three men. "See to it he helps bury his body." One of her eyes rolled around and rested on Tyr.

"I am of little use with a spade," Tyr replied, wary enough in their joint presence, as his pistol had been knocked far distant from him, and this newcomer (Robin) was still easily armed and clearly had the upper hand - even as he attempted to suss out Lady Marion's injury. "And you have cost me two of my best fingers." He held up the wilted looking glove to show where Robin had sheared off the two digits of his wooden prosthetic.

"Be glad you are yet alive, _Whichman_," Marion warned him, her eyes translating the grief she was only beginning to feel over Thornton into deep, scorching scorn. "No one present will mind, much less pity you, to see you on your knees, digging with what God has left you of your hands."

* * *

**Barnsdale Estate -** _What a night!_ He could hardly get his breath.

Certainly the surprises did not stop coming. Him, back at the carriage house to be surprised by a man he eventually puzzled out as Joss Tyr in an inside-out Royal Army jacket, giving him Oxley's codeword, '_Pennsylvania six, five-thousand_', and demanding he gather up Eleri and head out into the Jerry-patrolled, off-limits darkness.

Allen Dale knew allies sometimes wore the strangest of faces, but surely Tyr's must be the strangest yet. A man born into the camp of the enemy, who had served his masters well as an officer, and since his accident and disfigurement had served them in other, exotic ways (assuming anything of the rumors one heard at the Dixcart was to be believed). Yet here was Tyr, carrying Robin's code, knowing where the Nightwatch windmill was. Bringing news that Lady Marion had been shot.

There was nothing to do in response but obey '_Pennsylvania six, five-thousand_', and move quickly; collect Eleri, and in the doing of it not for one moment turn his back on this curious convert to the Resistance.

Before ascending all the way to the nursery, Allen had stopped in Marion's former room to stealthily gather up a piece or two of what she had there of sturdy, comfortable clothing, and a fistful of towels that might work as impromptu bandages, if needed.

* * *

Eleri had not stirred when he entered the nursery, nor the bedroom within it. Laid out in sleep upon the child's bed he certainly had no trouble seeing her, too, as yet something of a child, for all her put-on airs and attempts at grabbing the world by its throat and bending it to her will. For all that her father was a sick monster with an insatiable appetite for perverse brutality.

_Who was he to lay judgment upon her as she searched this harsh world of Occupation and war for love?_ Certainly whatever religious version of it she had known in the convent had not been the _right_ kind, the _best_ kind (as if he, himself, might even know what that was). Clearly it had not satisfied, not fulfilled her.

"Come, my girl," he whispered to her, not wishing to startle her awake. "You are needed to help..." and, as it was still the best dis-arming mechanism he knew to enact upon the mercurial Eleri Vaiser, he bent to plant a kiss on her lips.

Her eyes opened at his lips' touch, and when he pulled slightly away, she said, still sleepily, "I am angry at you. Why am I angry at you?"

He moved his mouth to salute her forehead like a good brother or uncle, and chose to explain what was to come, rather than to dredge up what had already, earlier that night, occurred.

"Lady Marion is hurt, and she is asking for you. So on with your duds, Ellie." He kissed the white, center parting in her dark hair this time, noting that at Marion's name a more full degree of wakefulness had come over her. "Something hardy, though, a good pair of boots - 'can't say as how far we have to go."

Like a good child she rose and walked over to the florally upholstered changing screen that shielded half of the room's clothes cupboard, and set to doing as she was told.

* * *

**Nightwatch Windmill -** Tyr had left. Realizing the information he was most keen to learn, Robin had promised to tell him the tale of Marion's ring's previous owner upon his faithful return with Allen and Eleri. His and Marion's joint expectation that Tyr would return was furthered by the notion that, had they a mind to, they could expose him and his activities as the Whichman to his countrymen, leave his disciplining up to them.

She almost asked Robin why he was letting Tyr live. Why he had not, like that time on Sark with Thomas Carter, simply gone into a blood-frenzy and torn out the man's throat with his bare hands. But even in the haze of her injury she saw two things. The first, that they needed Tyr alive to go for help, the second, that at the time Carter had taken her Robin had had no security of her, no confidence that came from the two of them being the whole they were always meant to be. When he had found them he had seen so much more than simply her shorn hair and bruised face, her disintegrating frock. He had seen someone shortly to end any hope he would ever have at a reconciliation between them. Someone far less capable of rising to her own defense as she had tonight. So many things had been working on him in that moment those months ago. And he was less removed from the inhumanity of battle than in these intervening months he had become.

Of course, she felt not quite so confident that when Tyr returned Robin mightn't give in to anger and still put a bullet in his head, dropping him in to share the grave they were to dig for Thornton. She must remember to specify for him not to act so. Must remember to tell Allen that Tyr must live, though she herself felt murderously enough toward him for two. Would feel relief, no doubt, at seeing him punished for what he had done to Mr. Thornton.

Robin asked her where he might find what she had left of her spirit stash.

Marion half-groaned. "It will take more than you would like to know to get me properly pickled."

He looked down at her, at her grim face of confession, recalling an armoire packed with various levels of liquid in glass decanters and bottles. Of the condition in which the now late Mr. Thornton had related finding her following Sir Edward's death.

Of how for him, liquor had once been an escape from a life without the potential for effect, a way to feel _something_ - if only a false happiness. Of how for her it had clearly become a retreat from true despair, a way to feel _less_ - an insulator that had helped her pass the days, soften the never-ending blows and horrors of the Occupation.

"That, I think, my love," he told her, his voice flooded with greatest tenderness, "is a conversation for another time."

"Then you agree that we will yet have some time...together?" she handily turned their discussion to the potential severity of her wound.

"I have seen men march an hundred miles after such a piercing," he bragged, though something about his eyes did not fully support the sentiment. "We must but staunch the bleeding, keep you here in the doing of it, quiet and resting, and your only worry will be how to travel far enough West to accept what the Yanks call a 'Purple Heart' from their Mr. Roosevelt."

She directed him to the location of the last of the bottles, and he brought over the one he thought would act quickest, and taste best.

She drank from it, and soon enough found herself still in Robin's arms where he had re-seated himself on the floor, supporting her at an angle. Still in his arms, though not quite. Rather, somewhere floating slightly above them, and also found her mind (once it had been distanced from the pain in her shoulder by the alcohol taking full-effect) choosing to ponder the matter of Joss Tyr, Marion Nighten, and Miranda, the former Lady Nighten.

* * *

**1939 - London's West End - Mayfair - Edward, Lord Nighten's Georgian town house -** One of her mother's oldest friends, Lady Lytton, had come to tea. A friend of such long-standing intimacy even Marion's father, Sir Edward, called her by her first name, simply, 'Livonia'.

A friend that until Marion's more recent years of attempting to be more grown up (and then actually becoming so), Marion herself was allowed to call, merely, 'Livvy'.

Her mother had not yet arrived to the tea, instead asking Marion to sit and entertain Lady Lytton momentarily as she finished her toilet before coming down.

Marion sighed. "You should have seen her at the stationer's," Marion groaned only half-mockingly at her mother's behavior in the selecting of engagement party invitations. "She may as well have been Nelson, overseeing the traffic in Trafalgar. Or Mr. Disraeli ordering about his staff before the opening of Parliament."

"Yes," Lady Lytton commiserated with good-naturedness, "Kate does manage to assay Society with a grit and gusto usually found only in politics."

"Why do you do that?" Marion asked, wondering why she had never questioned it before. "Call her 'Kate'? It is no part of her name."

For a moment, seemingly in consideration of the question, Lady Lytton studied the raisin in her teacake. "They have never told you, even after all this time?"

Marion's face clearly displayed a puzzlement that would not be distracted by the dainty finger foods piled on the multi-tiered silver stand placed on the low table between them.

"Well, I daresay, Darling, that it is time you heard. For had you been schooled outside of the home you would have heard it and learnt of it long ago since." Before beginning, she set down the small china plate, consigning its teacake to later, and drank no more, no less, than an entirely ladylike sip of tea. "It is an alias, of a kind. A name by which Miranda could never easily be connected with her family, or, later, your father."

"Why should she need an..._alias_?" Marion half-wondered if her mother were to be outed as some sort of clandestine lady novelist.

"At the age of seventeen - young, really - but there I was alongside her (of course I would have followed her into the Fiery Furnace, had she but stepped in that direction), we chose to become Suffragettes."

Marion's eyes half-bugged. _Was Lady Lytton simply mis-using the term? Confusing the 'suffragists' committed to peaceful, socially acceptable change with 'suffragettes', unswerving in their belief violent protests would help them win the field?_

"Of course, being from affluent families, being members of the nobility, made this quite...awkward. Your grandfather, Miranda's father (it is a pity he died before you could have known him), permitted her to be involved, so long as she kept the family well out of it. And so she created 'Kate Bridges', and pledged herself to the Women's Social and Political Union."

"I was not instructed much on suffrage -" Marion began.

"I do not doubt it."

"- but were they not a rather...militant organization?"

"My, yes. We were an outraged cabal, determined to change the world. Window-smashing, hunger-strikes, arson, even. Why, Mary Richardson took an axe to the Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery to protest Emmeline's force feeding."

"Force feeding?"

Lady Lytton nodded. "In prison."

_What was this tale? She could easily see her mother falling in - for the sake of what may have been fashionable at the time - with women committed to change. Certainly Lady Nighten had chaired enough commissions and committees on everything from poverty to unemployment to immigrants in Marion's lifetime. But the unglamorous notion of prison sentences, of women so steadfast in their cause they would not eat - upon pain of having food __forced__ on them? No. This she could not see._

Knowing how to read the shifting tides in Marion's eyes well-enough by this time, Lady Lytton nodded in disagreement with her friend's disbelieving daughter. "Miranda was imprisoned from time to time as well. But there was such a light about her, Marion. Such a passion within her, it spilled out. It called to others. It swelled the movement."

"And her family - what of them?"

"Well they weren't pleased, to be sure. But her father had never been able to deny her anything she wished. And the newspapers never decoded her alias, never printed her true identity."

Marion's mouth felt unusually dry. "And what, what of _my_ father?"

"Edward? Darling, Edward didn't have a chance. The year Miranda was presented at Court, Edward was - what, forty-two? - taken by all for a lifetime bachelor. But here's Miranda, nineteen, on fire with her commitment to changing politics (and then the very world) as we knew it, and the most eye-catching thing he had ever seen. And though your father was never caddish in his single life, rest assured, no man gets to that age without knowing something of women.

"She sparkled like diamonds in a sea of unpolished cut glass. Her Court gowns were exquisite, her hairstyles the envy of every town party. And her rhetoric, and the logic and ardor behind it were both genuine and rationally sound. If you had your eye on Edward when she would arrive at a party (and I often had the opportunity to do just this), her entrance would nearly knock him off his feet.

"People assumed, of course, he was simply making a fool of himself, pursuing a woman twenty-four years his junior, with suitors enough to stretch 'round the block. Assumed the Season would end, Miranda's engagement to some suitably wealthy and stable young lord would be announced, and Lord Nighten would return to his seat (and his sanity) in the House of Lords."

"But she married Father."

Lady Lytton's face took on the slyest of smiles. "She not only married him, she loved him as passionately as she loved the Cause. He seemed to represent to her some...masculine political ideal. An equally-committed lover. And he was, and had been committed to women's suffrage even before they were introduced. In his reserved and well-reasoned way, of course. He threw no rocks, had no need to employ hunger strikes or take on a separate identity. Always, he chose to work within the system. Which of course, being both a man and holding a seat in the House of Lords, was an option open to him."

"And when Mother was - imprisoned?" Marion's mind and nearly her mouth stuttered over the foreign notion.

"To his great credit, he let her be. And to maintain 'Kate Bridges'. At her express wish he did not even visit her. And when the harsh feedings were employed, he was in his seat at Parliament, fighting in his way for the same thing she was, in hers." Here she sighed. "Nineteen-ten was expected to be, by them, the happiest of their new marriage, as they watched the Conciliation Bill make its way through the political system."

Here, Marion's keen mind for historical recall snagged. "But that bill never enfranchised women."

"No. Not as it ultimately stood. By November of that year, Mr. Asquith had changed the bill, instead, to extend voting rights to more men, perverting its original intent. Miranda was distraught. Edward felt betrayed by the other MPs who had stood with him in original support of changing the law. The WSPU intensified their actions beyond mere civil disobedience and destruction of public property." And here her voice grew quiet. "We made our first foray into arson, and bombings. It was after the Great War. Perhaps we fancied ourselves inured to such destructive violence.

"February of 'thirteen, we burned down Mr. Lloyd George's house, for failing to support equal suffrage for all women. By April, the government had grown tired of our behavior while imprisoned (and by the way our hunger strikes outraged the general public against their cruelty toward us). They passed the Cat and Mouse Act, which would release us from prison when our health was threatened by refusing to eat, and then allow them to re-arrest us when we had recovered. Our original tactics had become a vicious merry-go-round. Then, the Epsom Derby."

Marion nodded. "Yes, a woman spectator was killed there. I recall reading of it."

"She was no mere woman, nor mere spectator, Marion. It was Emily Davison. She _walked_ in front of the King's Horse, intent on martyring herself for the Cause. It was after that your mother no longer came out with us as 'Kate Bridges', or, in fact, at all."

A knot closed around Marion's throat, but she had to ask. "Did Father refuse to let her?"

Lady Lytton's smile turned soft as she looked over the young lady before her. "It was not as simple as that, Marion. Your mother was twenty-two years old, Clem was about two. When Emily died so violently - so unexpectedly, her injury occurring fully in the public eye - it was earth-shattering for those of us within the Cause. We had heard 'no' so many times, even, as with the Conciliation Bill, when we wholeheartedly expected to triumph. Miranda was a wife and mother. With Emily's death the stakes had become so much higher. Two weeks before the Derby, _Miranda_ had just been released from jail due to her health. She was tremendously weak, her body battered by the various means and tools employed in 'feedings'. She had never wished to die for the Cause. She had wanted to live for it. And she loved your father, and baby Clem. And though you were four years off, I know she was also thinking of you - of the future. And so it was decided she would no longer actively pursue being 'Kate Bridges'. Though she never withdrew that name from the WSPU rolls, and regularly donated monies to support them."

Marion found she wanted the story to go on. The heroine in it to triumph, not falter. "And so she rested for a while, perhaps grew depressed. And when she came back to herself -"

Again, the kind smile. "Found another arena in which to express her talents."

"Society." It may as well have been a swear word.

"It was '28, of course, when we finally were recognized on equal voting terms with men. Surely you were old enough to remember that?"

"Yes," Marion agreed, finding that with this story she was able to see much of her younger life cast in a very different light. An unsettling one. "They had been invited to a small party in celebration at Lord Heatherly's. Father attended. Mother stayed in her room, alone." Her voice grew wistful. "She had a headache all that day."

"She was a goddess, Marion, the way she served the Cause. A burning fire of righteousness at which others warmed themselves. There are times even now when I meet an old friend from those days who recalls a public speech she had given, or a, a pamphlet written by her that provided strength during the hardest times when it seemed we would never be heard."

Marion's face gave a forced, line of a smile. "And now she has...Society."

"And _you_, Marion. She has _you_," Lady Lytton reached over to squeeze her hand. "And you have the very dashing young Oxley I am told, more than ready to 'set the date'."

Marion had continued her smile, but inside she had felt nothing but the swirl of bile.

* * *

**Present time - Nightwatch Windmill -** _Duality_. Two identities caught up within the same person. Her mother, Miranda, and Kate Bridges. Werner von Himmel and Joss Tyr. Marion Nighten and the Nightwatch.

How to not let them overcome your true self. How to puzzle out which one actually _was_ your true self. Her mother had killed Kate Bridges, abandoned her, leaving only some version (it would seem, according to Lady Lytton) of a shell known as Lady Nighten, hardly a whole. Certainly not a whole in public. In public Lady Nighten was rarely thought to have an idea in her head beyond those best addressed by the upper echelon of household staff, or a Parisian atelier. And that was seen to be entirely appropriate.

Joss Tyr had so overcome the man Count Werner von Himmel he shunned the very use of the name, was going about the countryside killing entirely innocent Islanders without any clear remorse. Of course, she hadn't known him before - perhaps it was the same sort of thing he would have done under his Jerry commanders. Only, in this instance he would have given Thornton a medal, and her, (thinking her a collaborator) a new pair of nylons.

_And Lady Marion_.

How she had been losing the strength to tread water before her engagement party. The actual Lady Marion threatening to capsize, going down three times, only coming up twice, in the wake of the mask she had to wear for Geis and his kind. She was not entirely sure she would re-surface, even, as the Nightwatch, or if she would only have fractured herself somehow, permanently damaged what it was that defined - that had _once_ defined - her.

But for Robin she was sure she would have shortly found out. _But for Robin_.

The pain was coming back, like the persistent sizzle of a burn that carries on long after the skin is removed from the cooktop, her surroundings growing clearer. She gave a ragged breath and felt Robin tense, and his hand go for the spirits.

"No," she told him, having had enough for the moment of dulling herself, of distancing herself from this present. "Not just now. Kiss me," she said. "Kiss me, instead. We are alone."

"You're going to be fine," he told her, resisting the urge to tighten his embrace of her.

"I know," she replied, with contentment. "I'm here, with you."

**...TBC...**


	39. Chapter 39

**GUERNSEY - outside Nightwatch windmill, just beyond the cellar doors -** "Ox, it's clean-through," Allen Dale dared to bicker with his commanding officer about the severity of the Lady Marion's wound.

"Don't try and diminish it."

"Well, this - us, out here, curfew still in force, dawn coming on sooner than later - this is no time to argue."

"Do not tell me when it is the time to argue."

"We've both of us seen worse in combat, _Sir_." He tried to make the most of his use of the deferential title. "Ellie's here to look out for her, and _we've_ got to be going. 'Got me an early call with the Kommandant. He don't take it too kindly when the man he gave a boat to get himself to work on time...doesn't."

"No one's said you need be late for work."

"I'm not being funny, right?" Allen protested. "She's breathing. Bleeding's stopped. A sight better off than Royston when we first got here and pulled him from the sea. Than you when you got that," he waved his hand as if illustrating, "_thing_ in your..._place_, before Carter broke out," he referenced Robin's wounding prior to Marion's kidnapping.

Unconvinced, Robin shook his head. "I'm staying. Soon as can be, you bring her John, we'll have him check her out."

"Yeah, well, hard to do _that_ when I'm not leavin' you here."

"And I'm not leaving _her_."

"Well, I do not think there can be _much_ wrong with her the way she was ordering you about in there over how to handle Tyr..."

Clearly having stopped listening to Allen further, Robin seemed to strike upon an idea. "Then we will bring her with us."

Up went a single Dale eyebrow. "Because a boat out on the open water is a good idea for a gunshot victim?"

"You said yourself we've seen worse in combat."

Allen pursed his lips, flat-lining them together. "Don't recall much jostling wounded men about solely on a whim, but I've said my piece, I'll not go without you." He gave a sort of sigh that was more of an inconvenienced huff. "We'll find a way to bring her, if that's what you want."

* * *

**SARK - Rufford's tenement -** It proved to be pressing the boundaries of belief, the period of time Roger Stoker had had to maintain his feigned state of unconsciousness. Thankfully, the woman of the house had left three of the smaller children to spy on him, busying herself elsewhere in the home. Had he not been so alive with adrenaline at finally being _on_ Sark, he did not doubt he would have dropped off to sleep, there upon their horsehair divan. He let himself listen to the speech cadences of the children left to mind him, at least two of them of an age old enough that they should have been evacuated prior to occupation. The youngest, he would guess, born since that time, though only just. He wondered about their absent father (it seemed more than apparent that the woman of the house was also, in this case, the 'man'). All thoughts of course returning to the question of what she had decided to do with him.

Fortunately they did not attempt a search of his person, for though they would have found little, it would have been more than enough to 'out' him as off-island, and bound somewhere on a mission.

When he heard the door he had priorly been carried through being opened and a pair of large boots with considerable weight behind them, he knew he could wait no longer. He meant to face whatever had come eyes open and fists at the ready.

"Wot's this, Abby," he heard a broad voice ask in another part of the house. "Your young man's 'ere's come-a callin', sayin' you've a nighttime visitor in new-soled boots."

Stoker did not lay still long enough to hear the widow Rufford set in to her usual speech about not _wanting_ to know what was going on, only to remove herself (and her children) from the immediate vicinity and the danger of it. He swung those boots that had yet to see a particularly hard day's work (or march) onto the floor and followed the man's voice, chasing after it with his own.

"You worthless sea dog," he shouted through the house, not using names lest they be unknown here. "You rubbish excuse for a - " but he got no further. Royston had found him, and the only thing that silenced the clomp of the explosives expert's large boots against Abby Rufford's plank floors was when he came to a halt and grabbed Stoker up into thick, seaman's arms, even all this time ashore more used to coiling down ropes, nearly slapping the wind out of both of them.

"God save you, Stoke," Royston declared. "We thought you give up the war for a tidy patch in the country."

"Never," declared Stoker, on what breath he could marshal. "Not as long as my men are still in the thick of it." He caught the long un-seen eyes of his friend. "_Never_."

* * *

Rolling her eyes at the last moments of this robust meeting, which she had arrived to observe, Abby Rufford moved to the kitchen to scare up something hot, knowing it would be some minutes yet before her house was free of these two (and again relatively safe), and knowing that men - whether they met in joy or mourning - were happier with drinks, or vittles, in their hands.

* * *

**Among fields -** Marion knew they had begun walking as speedily as she could endure as a threesome, her propped up between Robin and Allen as though they were her living crutches. But at some point (she could not quite recall it), the two had, of necessity, swept her up into their linked arms, in something of a chair-carry. How ridiculous they would look if caught, her being borne about in the arms of two men across fields and the occasional animal pen as though they were twin Sir Walter Raleighs, and she were Queen, and it beneath her for her feet to touch the ground.

"Drink all of it," Allen had demanded of her, just before letting her disembark his launch onto Sarkese soil, and unlike Robin (whose back had momentarily been turned, his hands at the task of tying off the boat), the man masquerading as merely the Kommandant's driver had been sure to tilt the bottle in question (at her lips, but tentatively so) down her throat when she had not been expecting it, suspecting (rightly) that she was of a mind to take only the smallest amount of the liquor, as she preferred sense rather than the insensibility so much ingested in such a short time might bring.

It was little wonder, then, that she had been unable to maintain her footing and had to be carried, rushed through occasional, mist-rising-with-the-near-dawn woods, Robin and Allen unable to pay any mind to small streams, their trouser legs no doubt wet to the knees with their rapid crossings of them.

At some point it began to lightly rain - nothing too soaking, unless, like them, you were indefinitely caught out in it. She had lost all orientation of place or time - though if she concentrated she could discern that there was still, perhaps, forty or so minutes until full-dawn.

They came to what she could discern, even in the rain, was La Coupee, and managed, against the elements, to cross on its narrow strip of rustic roadway. After that she must have lost consciousness, because she remembered nothing until a far fuller darkness than that they had been in enveloped their trio, and the smell of something like the cold stone of a cave and the earthiness of a burrow met her nose, and both men shouted far more loudly than they would ever have dared out in the open for their fellow John.

But even in the darkness she could tell the man that took her useless weight from them - allowing them to break the chair-carry - was not the large Scotsman, though his strength proved more than sufficient to the task.

Moments before he carried her (with Robin and Allen following) into the lighted portion of what was the Little Sark mine - as reclaimed by Unit 1192 - she lost consciousness yet again.

* * *

Thomas Carter walked with a suspicious ease (at least to Robin's eye), despite holding the unconscious bulk of a wounded Marion in his arms. He brought her to one of the several improvised 'bunks' here, most frequently used by Johnston and Royston, and occasionally by Wills and Robin. He chose for her the one from which he had, himself, just risen. Knowing the other men were not expected to bed there that night, he had assembled all the bed clothing (rugs, two tapestries, more than several old sacks originally filled with seed) at a single berth, in an attempt to cull what warmth and comfort he could from them.

As gently as possible he laid her down upon them, casting his eye about for what might stand-in as a coverlet.

"Look, she's been shot," Allen spoke up, knowing better than to wait for Robin to share freely in front of the RAF pilot, their relationship business-like, but still strained.

Politely, Carter declined to comment that Lady Marion's wounding was more than obvious from the blood staining her blouse.

"We give her summat to put her out," Allen added, himself having had no further negative run-ins with (nor hard feelings against) the man who had once bloodthirstily attacked him. "It's a clean-through, but we're getting John out to look her over."

Carter nodded. Certainly that seemed sensible, even if transporting her such a great distance from Guernsey, and at such a level of risk, did not.

"I'm off, then," Allen added, cheerily, as the other two men continued to refrain from speech.

Carter looked to Robin, who had not stirred from the place where he had stopped, looking down at Marion. He showed no sign of any intent to leave.

"I'll stop in at La Salle's and tell John he's sent for, then?" Allen, just as he was turning to go, prompted Robin.

"There is a business there that must be dealt with," Carter said, his tone unemotional, but resolved. He spoke to Robin's back.

"And it is of a pressing nature?" Robin asked to air in front of him, not turning.

"It is business that would concern an effective commanding officer," Carter countered, and was rewarded by Robin's turning sharply toward him.

As he turned, he caught Allen's eye. Carter's unusual presence here (and not at the farmhouse) should have been an immediate indication of some trouble.

"I will be back _instantly_," Robin informed them both, with a declaration he could not possibly keep. He swallowed back what he wanted to say next to the flyer, something a bit more threatening in its nature.

And with a tin cup of water for each, and a kiss for Marion from Robin, Robin and Allen set themselves again to rushing - this time back over La Coupee and toward La Salle's.

* * *

It was only a little while later she opened her eyes to see Thomas Carter seated (on a crate crudely labeled 'boom'), leaning forward and watching her, their surroundings looking nothing like any she had ever seen before.

"The bad news," he said, from where his elbows perched upon his knees, the fingers of both his hands interlaced about a tin cup, "is you've been shot."

This, she remembered.

"The good news," he went on, "is that it wasnﾒt by me." And he smiled.

And she smiled, managing a sigh as a full-on laugh would have rattled her bones to the point of pain. And she thought, quite possibly, she was going to be alright.

* * *

"You're not thinkin' much like yourself, Boss," Allen ventured during one of the periodic moments in their running when they had to slow briefly to catch their breath and find another wind.

Robin's answer, available without the need for deeper thought, showed he had been musing on this very problem most of the night. "It is the first time in my life that I must attempt to fully be the man I am become, and the lover I have only ever, to-date, been in spurts."

"Ah," said Allen, as if he understood. "So you must balance the mission with the woman."

"Aye. Though the woman, though _Marion_ feels - _is_, is become, as important as the mission."

"Yeah, well, don't let's slight the mission - nor its faithful practitioners," Allen warned, himself having no such self-image problems or romantic schisms at present.

"How long have you known Vaiser's daughter, now, would you say?"

"A while. Why'd'ye you ask?"

Robin shrugged, reaching down to take a hand and bring water from a shallow, narrow-running rivulet of stream up to his mouth. The rain had gone, and dawn had begun to pinken around them. "Tonight she looked at you as though she had never seen you before." He recalled something from the past. "I thought you had said she was twitterpated on Tyr. Hardly gave him more than a passing glance."

"Ach," Allen shrugged off questions of Eleri Vaiser's inconsistent attention span. "We two'd had us a spat earlier. Like as not she was takin' my measure for some voodoo pin-doll she's planning to sew up."

Before they could need to stop again, they were to the edge of La Salle's barnyard, well within sight of the house.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Mr. Thornton's Cottage, earlier that night -** The body of Mr. Thornton had been easy enough to find - still within his cottage, him not daring to stir outside of it, even in the wake of his own execution when the German curfew was yet in effect.

He was facedown by the half-glowing embers of the small fire laid in the fireplace. Facedown as though he had fallen forward, off bended knees. His body carried its mortal wound at the base of his skull. The area immediately about him was stained and pooling with blood and other equally unpleasant fluids.

"Couldn't even look at him while you shot 'im, then?" the Kommandant's driver asked.

"What did he say to you?" the other man - the one who claimed knowledge of Avia asked him, almost reverently, over the body.

Tyr knew both men expected him to discover deep remorse for what he had done, here within the wake of his miscalculation. But he also knew that he would not - that he could not. One crofter's life on these islands meant nothing. That was something the Germans (once, his people) had landed with the knowledge of. And that was something the British (among whom he would never truly belong) simply failed to get their heads around.

It was a rare person acting alone that could ever make a dent in the fabric of the world - _der Fuehrer_, of course, that mad from-nobody-and-nothing that had his native country in a stranglehold against which some chafed and others found pleasure, nourishing them on evil and perversity. This Nightwatchwoman - perhaps. Perhaps she might make a difference, of a sort. And the Whichman. He would play his part, not living to see what effect it would have, only knowing it was his part to play.

"I believe he said a prayer," Tyr responded dryly, recalling the final moments of the man lying in the blood on the floor. "He did not beg, nor offer to give up anyone or anything in an effort to spare his life. He remained...quite dignified throughout."

"Well ain't that a _blessin_'," Mr. Allen sneered out, heavy with sarcasm. "Pointless slaughter with a side of dignity."

"Grab his legs," the other directed.

"What shall I call _you_, then?" Tyr asked the second, unknown-to-him man as he moved to do as bidden.

Oxley exchanged a look with Dale.

"I should think 'my lord' will do quite nicely," the man replied, his tone only just modulating away from grim.

At this Tyr found himself on the verge of being charmed, wondering if the man who was styled as a commoner knew that, as rank of nobility goes, a Count trumps a mere English lord any day of the week (assuming the lord carried no other titles), and would never address anyone lower than himself as 'my' as though he were somehow in a servile position to them. _But, let the simple Islander have his joke. 'My lord' it would be. 'Your Eminence' if he demanded it_.

* * *

It proved a hard go, especially for Tyr, significantly handicapped for the activity, and finding his usual Guides - that essence that often gave him any vigor to which he could lay claim, the Spirits - had fallen silent.

Of a certain, Robin and Allen were not ignorant of the trebled effort it took Tyr to simply keep up with one of them, but they had no concept of the constant pain the man was under, the grinding turmoil with each movement, the jolts and shocks that ran through his hands, that often, with such physical activity, settled in the side of his face making him feel as though some cross between a wildfire and a hailstorm had broken out there, and tormented him often beyond powers of speech.

Pain, of course, was his constant companion, varying in degrees depending on the time of day, and level of inactivity, even, the barometer. By the time the grave was complete, and the body interned within it, his costume uniform was mud-caked, one of his prosthetics had broken to the point it became unstrapped from what remained of his hands, and the sweat of his brow had set his thick application of flesh-toned makeup to melting away from his real skin (and its disfiguring scars) like candle wax.

Though he did not say it aloud, Robin mused to himself that anyone encountering Joss Tyr in the woods that night would be less likely to accost him about breaking curfew and far _more_ likely to run, madly, in the opposite direction. Possibly, screaming.

"Let 'im go," Allen suggested. "He don't much look as though he's the wherewithal to make it back to his bed."

"It should be alright," Robin replied. "The man's supposed to be beyond indisposed after his show anyway. On the very brink of the spirit world. ...More so than usually."

Robin surveyed his very peculiar prisoner. "Very well, then, go. As for your dove, Avia, she has been re-christened 'Jill' and is in the best hands possible." In the dark he winced at the unkind (but unintentional) metaphor. "She was found after being nearly killed by the falcon _ReichKaptain_ Lamburg hunts got to her. Her message never made it to its intended recipient." Here he paused. "But I think she will stay apart from you a little longer. For I need assurance that you will not betray this evening to anyone, and right now holding on to her seems the best method of ensuring that. But do not fret yourself. We will meet again."

Tyr had listened hungrily as Oxley told the story of his missing dove. "Thank you, my lord," he replied, with a courtly (rather than stagey) flourish, sensing that now was not the time to go about pressing his luck, and he melted back into the woods, until neither Robin nor Allen could anymore distinguish him from man or tree.

* * *

Once Tyr was gone, Allen looked down at the disturbed earth between he and Oxley. "Do you want to say something?" he asked, imagining it was what Marion would desire, and knowing from experience that Robin (as any good commander) had various sections from _The Book of Common Prayer_ memorized for just such moments.

"Yes," Robin replied.

"Well go on, then," Allen encouraged, "On a bit of a tight schedule, here."

"I just...want to say that...a man keeps his powder dry, keeps it safe. Only takes it out in moments of direst need - when it might save his life. We have not been able to safeguard you here. I have not been able. I have had to ask something more, something risky of you, instead. And...I am not unaware of the difficulty in your particular mission here." As they had been digging, Robin had found himself musing on the mixed-up identities of Joss Tyr, and finding worrisome comparisons to the daily show of happy-go-lucky collaboration Allen was forced to put on. "Of what it must mean for you to be able to closet away so many of your true feelings and instincts while you must daily serve the enemy in order to serve the _unit's_ purpose."

Staring at Ox while he spoke so uncharacteristically, Allen made a sound of casual dismissal to cover what he felt was the moment's intense awkwardness.

Still, Robin went on. "I'm not one to try and shrink a man's head or anythin' - you know that - but know that I trust you, and that I support the decisions you're forced to make on the spot. And that you, Allen Dale, _you_ are my friend." Robin reached across the grave and clasped hands with Dale, taking his other hand to slap him hard on the shoulder as if to seal a deal, or commend him for a job well done.

"Now see," Allen spoke before he thought (a rare luxury for him where Robin was concerned in his high-stakes double life), "you've gone and sounded just like Mitch." Quickly he tried to cover up his use of the name, "that is, with far less stuttering or stalling. And I can't make out a _single_ tear wellin' up in your eye..."

Each man gave a gruff sort of laugh to the joke at Mitch's expense - so like old times, and then in the moment immediately following, suddenly burst into an unnecessary flurry of activity finding their spades to return to the proper shed, and continued on all a-bustle with the need to get back to the windmill without delay, the spell of truth and shared honesty broken.

**...TBC...**

* * *

_Author's Note:_ Today (November 1st) marks the one year anniversary of the beginning of the 'Don't' series. (Remember all those reviews saying - after _Apple Tree_ concluded - that you wished it could go on forever?) So party, re-read, invite a friend to join us, post some feedback, raise a glass of _Nehi_ Peach, eat an entire tube of _Pillsbury_ Cinnamon Rolls by yourself, put on your favorite war-era record and cut a rug. Whatever means celebration to you.

For those of you that have reviewed the last two chapters, thank you. I _will_ be replying, as well as to any non-fic related e-mails.


	40. Hurt Comfort Woman Problems

**GUERNSEY - path from Barnsdale to Nightwatch Windmill - earlier that night -** Eleri Vaiser could feel the desperate pressure of her own nervous palm in her father's chauffeur's far-more-composed one once he had taken her hand to pull her into the estate's small woods and out of the revealing moonlight. Not letting go, he ran after the man leading them easily, as though such post-midnight streaks were commonplace to him, her being the only thing at present holding him back.

She was not used to the night. Not used to tree roots and shadows and the way her heart had set up pounding when he had told her Lady Marion was hurt. _Alive!_ it had leapt. _Lady Marion alive! And found!_ Only to be followed by; '_hurt!_' And that somehow, amazingly, in all of this she was needed. How, she could not quite fathom, but help she certainly wished to.

She tried to concentrate on the shadow of the crest of his left shoulder (the shoulder whose hand gripped hers). It did her no good to try and sight her feet, hoping to move them with greater efficiency through what underbrush there was. She had still fallen several times. That is, she _would_ have fallen - face into the ground - had his grasp of her hand not jerked her back up before she met with the forest floor.

"Step lively, now!" he had encouraged her, taking a half-second to throw the words over his shoulder - only a half-second so as not to lose sight of the other man. She wondered if he knew the growing pain - like a muscle burning - in her shoulder at his brusque (but necessary) treatment. Wondered if he would be concerned, or perhaps enjoy having brought it about.

They bounded through further trees, over a turnstile, past a quick-running brook and across several fields, unexpected rabbit holes and occasional rocks large enough to twist an ankle jostling her young bones even further.

* * *

She found sleep harder to throw off than she would have expected, her pell-mell progress to the spot where Lady Marion was seeming more like the extenuation of a particularly vivid dream. It made her brain fuzzy, not quite its steel-trap self.

The man leading them ducked into the cellar opening of a particularly dilapidated stone-based windmill. She had seen its like before on the island, but had been told, she recalled, that few if any of them were still in working order. Certainly that was the case with this tumbledown edifice. But as they proceeded down the stairs behind their guide, and Mr. Allen dropped her hand so that he and she might use both theirs on what there was of railings, she could see a glow of low light coming from within the cellar. And once to the bottom she noticed both their guide and Mr. Allen had to stutter step and half-leap to avoid some large obstacle.

When she did see what it was that impeded their way she was not sure to be more taken aback by the fact Lady Marion seemed to have obviously sustained a gunshot wound, or that she was being held, quite intimately, in the open embrace of a rough-looking peasant man, her back to his chest, her cheek against the work-a-day weave of his jacket's shoulder.

"Come along," Mr. Allen said to the seated man, relieving him of his place, "Miss Eleri's here, now." Mr. Allen's eyes indicated to her that it was her job now to take up a similar position, supporting Lady Marion.

"Mind her as best you know how," he instructed, for a moment turning his fullest attention to her. "See that she drinks but doesn't move about. And don't disturb the wound dressing."

Eleri looked up at him, at his reliably well-groomed appearance, his buttermilk linen long-sleeved shirt (for the Occupation, _richly_) sporting enough fabric to supply matching breast pockets with button flaps, his fashionable, high-waisted trousers cinched, even, with a belt. A touch of class, that, for these islands, where she had (again) been told that the reason so many island men were seen in crude belts fashioned of rope (or braces made similarly) was because leather had become ever-more precious. That some (she could hardly imagine it) were boiling it for food. A dinner of belts and shoes. It sounded impossible. But even now, here was that rough-looking peasant man, his jacket peeking open enough to show a flash of a rope brace. No doubt it still smelt of the fishing vessel where it had likely originated.

Now that he had instructed her, Mr. Allen fell to having a discuss with the two other men, all three ignoring her as though she were not even present. Lady Marion remained asleep.

The man that had proven her guide was hard to puzzle out. His face was not easy to see in the lowlight, but she did not think she knew him. He was wearing a very strange version of a uniform, she thought, though for what profession she could not guess, its top coat switched about as if to deliberately conceal whatever clue it might give her.

As they argued she took a moment to survey her surroundings. (Their dialogue was quite rapid and it was no great challenge for her to disengage her French/German mind from the need of translating it.) It was a smallish space, this half-cellar. She saw a record player, a stack of several records, and some small crates and glass jars of canned goods. There really was no space more comfortable to transfer Lady Marion to.

And then she heard it. A particularly brief - but unmistakable - moment of phrasing that told her who the third man was. The mystic Joss Tyr. It was nearly at this same moment that she sighted the microphone and the wires climbing up the rickety stair toward the outside that surely must signal they were crawling toward a transmission antenna.

Eleri managed not to gasp at her discovery, the gears in her mind turning far too quickly to stay shocked for long. No one had said _how_ Lady Marion had come to receive her wound, but Eleri thought now, no one would need to. It was apparent that Joss Tyr, _Joss Tyr_ was the outlaw known as the Nightwatch, and this windmill was his hideout. Somehow (she could not say how) the Lady Marion must have stumbled upon it, and in defense of his secret identity - and of his very life if he were found out - Tyr had shot her.

Thankfully, not mortally so.

Eleri did not know how the second man, the peasant man figured into things. Perhaps he owned the windmill. She found she would rather not think too closely on him, on the edge of danger that had swum in his eyes as he cradled Marion, on the way that even now he kept looking back to her, even amidst his arguing.

_And how did Mr. Allen fit into this?_ She had never had any reason to think he knew Joss Tyr more than simply on sight - as did most residents of St. Peter Port. He was her father's chauffeur, his employee, yet he did not seem to be doing any job of which Heinrik Vaiser would approve, much less tolerate. He held himself with, she thought, a greater level of competency among these two other men, here that he would usually. As though he had no doubt he was their equal. Of the peasant man, she did not doubt - but of Tyr, a German Count? A psychic touchstone to the World beyond? Closest companion to _OberAdmiral_ Prinzer?

Lady Marion stirred. "Eleri," she said, as though saying a 'hello'. "Good. Call Allen over," she asked, wincing slightly and tensing with the pain of speech and being bedded on a hard-packed floor.

"Mr. Allen," Eleri said it like one clearing her throat, not certain it would be heard over the men's rapid, deliberate words. But he turned back, and seeing Marion awake, walked away from the others and went down on one knee, the better to speak with her.

"I need him _alive_," Lady Marion began without preamble, her eyes boring into Mr. Allen's, as if her very expression might make a point. "When you are away, ask - ask what he has proven he is able to do. Such peculiar talent might serve us in future."

"And you fear," Mr. Allen turned back to look at the rough peasant man, "he will not be permitted to live out the night?"

Lady Marion tried to hold in a cough, Eleri felt her lungs tense in the attempt. "There are already too many bullets sunk into the wrong people tonight. Swear to me you will prevent another."

Before Mr. Allen could make his vow, the peasant man stomped over, also having realized Lady Marion was conscious. "What's this?" he demanded, half-belligerent. "What plans could you two possibly have to spin without my knowing?"

And again, the accents seemed to become thicker, the speed of the argument increased, and Eleri was left with two questions: what on earth would cause Lady Marion to need the help (of _all_ people) of her father's feckless chauffeur; and, had Lady Marion, in the end, gotten her way?

* * *

**Present time - SARK - Blind La Salle's tenement -** Upon entering the farmhouse by its front door, Robin walked directly for the closed-door parlor and seated himself within it, sending Allen to call for John, Wills, and Royston. The briefest encounter with Stephen in the barnyard had quickly put a face to the problem Carter had referenced, Robin's mind at present so singularly fixed he had gotten only what he had wanted from Stephen before stalking away, desiring to hear no other news at present.

The three men summoned entered fast upon the heels of one another, each seeming to have in their eyes something to tell him, but his demeanor gave them momentary pause.

"Marion has been shot," he informed them, bristling with full-on commanding officer mode. "She rests at present in the mines with Carter. I am sure you can see that I am most anxious to return there as soon as can be. But I find that issues of my men's conduct return me here, and keep me from a far better duty than this, of sorting out a clutch of Georgie Porgies."

Without referencing what had occurred, he demanded simply, "who knew?", his eyes flashing from one man's to the next.

A slight creak was heard from outside the door that exited onto the hallway, signaling an eavesdropper, and Robin's eyes slid over to Allen's. "Take her off somewhere she cannot overhear, Dale. I will speak with her later," and the double use of the feminine pronoun could leave no doubt in any man's mind of what Robin had asked them about.

John and Wills raised their hands with a slowness that tracked as reluctance, the expressions on their faces points on a continuum of grim.

Royston half-boisterously announced that he'd, 'had no (and here there was a generous degree of colorful swearing) idea'.

"And what have you two to say for yourselves?" their commanding officer asked.

"_Her_, I like," said John, surprisingly speaking up first.

"I think I love her," Wills nearly overspoke his more taciturn comrade's declaration. His face did not blanch, but his eyes seemed momentarily to petrify, neither blinking nor moving, like the glass substitutions in a hunter's mounted trophy head. This was not at all what he had planned to say in his defense.

"You love her," Robin spoke his own words back to him.

It took Wills a moment to re-find his voice. "Well not, you know, not immediately. Not right away. Just, you know, it - sort of snuck up on me."

Royston slapped one hand almost-injuriously on Wills' back. "Lad's not seen a girl, much less had one of his own in what, nearly a year? 'Tis only science that he's got 'imself with his head turned 'round 'bout this."

Robin coolly allowed the interjection, but did not reply to it. "And have you told her this?"

"No. Absolutely not."

Robin considered a moment. "John, you are needed to examine Marion at the mines. Wills, it will be the mines for you, also."

Silence again fell, but the temperature of the air settling about Wills rose by several degrees. He had been entirely honest, he had been honorable. And yet he was to be sent away to the mines? Banished as punishment?

"But what of you, and Marion?" Wills found himself precariously attempting an argument of one-for-one rationale. "I have told Djak nothing of these feelings of mine. I have _never_ acted upon them," he took a half-step forward, out of the line. "We none of us has ever interfered with the courting of the two of you."

It was a risky moment to tweak at Robin in such a way, Marion hurt and his temperament torn in several unpleasant directions. He managed with some difficulty to restrain himself from a worse response, and only answered Wills in words.

"_Marion_ is not a refugee, a displaced former slave worker and prisoner in hiding, in her mind no doubt beholden to us all on some level for her very life whether we accept such a responsibility or not. Your close proximity to Djak -

"Seraina," John interjected in a knee-jerk attempt at helpfulness.

"_Seraina_ - here, your status as her teacher, as a man she respects and of necessity shares the company of - we cannot be sure any of this is truly of her free will. Her will, after all, has not long been her own. And even now she must live, largely, as we dictate. The feelings you have inadvertently confessed (for I don't think you meant to reveal them here, in this forum) make you a powder keg in a match factory, Reddy." His mind was made up. "You will board at the mines, until I can better sort this."

For a moment, Wills looked as though he might (just like that powder keg) blow.

But behind Robin, where Allen had returned to the room to stand, Allen's brows drew together in concern and he mouthed the word, 'go', and recalled Reddy to himself, and Wills turned to leave the room, Johnson fast on his heels before a commensurate punishment could be handed out to him.

Royston managed to look quite pleased with himself for escaping the scolding scot-free.

Allen leaned over, his mouth near Robin's ear, and told him, "there is a delivery for you, in the kitchen."

* * *

**GUERNSEY - above Ginny Glasson's shop -** As Joss Tyr let himself quietly in to the blacked-out street-level shop, the public area within, with its several chairs for waiting customers and familiar, mirrored workstations were also darkened.

Still, even in his intense exhaustion he spotted the eyes of the proprietress for whom the shop was named, sitting in the dark alone, waiting.

She said nothing audible, but even across the distance, in the black, he could clearly read the same message he would have telegraphed to her had she arrived similarly: 'imprudent'. It was not an assessment with which he could argue.

He took a moment to rest against a stretch of flat wall nearby the curtain that cordoned off the storage area for the shop and the stairwell to the upper living quarters, and watched as she crossed the room toward him, silent, controlled, long accustomed to operating after dark.

She looked at him and wisely swallowed the words she wished to speak - that she would have asked anyone but him: _can you make the stairs?_

Instead, she let him tread them without assistance, walking (with frequent, necessary pauses) several steps behind him. From there, at least, to catch him should he fall. Which, he was not so confident he mightn't.

Painstakingly he made his way to the bedroom where he was expected by all those in power to have been resting since his farewell show...imploded, and this space had been commandeered for his express use.

He sat heavily upon the bed, the frame and its springs protesting.

She lit two candles, not risking the brighter lights.

He looked at his boots in a state of wonderment, curious as to whether he had the strength left to take them off.

She did not tell him he was filthy, did not tell him that the costume uniform might well have to be burned as it would never rebound in the wash from such harsh use. She stood, waiting, as he struggled with the boots, his lost prosthetic, the shorn wooden fingers from the other, impeding his success at every turn. Yet she offered no help.

Just as he nearly had them off, she turned and began to assemble several things on the bedside stand. The wrecked make-up on his face, attempting now to slough off into his eyes blurried his vision, and he could not tell what they were.

The boots were off.

The uniform coat he felt her fingers working to unbutton until he was down to a sleeveless undershirt. He heard its muddy weight hit the floor. He felt, more than saw, her own hands once done with his coat move to her nightdress, untying its front, until, like him, she was bared. Only, no half-modesty of a sleeveless undershirt for her.

Then, with consummate tenderness in her touch and grip, she rested the side of his face that could tolerate such pressure against the bared flesh of her breasts and abdomen as he sat upon the bed, and she stood beside it.

Slowly, like the lightest gust of an unseen breeze, he felt her begin the process of removing his destroyed-by-the-night face paint, a service he had never accepted from her before. He brought what there was of his hands up to the warm skin of her back, giving it one questing stroke, and rested them there near the hollow above her spine's base.

He rather thought, in that moment had someone sculpted them, the scene conveyed would have been far more Mother and Child than two lovers embracing.

He thought of his mother - of Werner von Himmel's mother. Thought of how he could not imagine her welcoming such a son - these dregs of what was left of her son - much less offering him any such warmly, intimately compassionate gesture. She had never been such a mother.

"Gin," he asked, after some minutes had passed, the side of his face still warmed by her skin, "How can someone so cold inside burn with such fire?"

She didn't answer, but began slowly removing his glued-on wig.

"Marion Nighten has been shot," he offered her, though too quietly to be conversational. "It would appear she is the Nightwatch." For a moment, he felt her trained hands cease in their work. "And the old man Thornton. He has been killed by the Whichman." He took a moment to consider, and added, "The Nightwatchwoman, I think, will live."

Here he felt an almost determined renewal of her ministrations, though they did not increase in pressure or spark any additional pain or intended discomfort in him.

"_Julian_ Thornton?" she asked to the air above his head.

He knew he did not have to confirm it.

"As a child he had...a radio set. And when my mother's sister moved to Sark she would go to a neighbor's house there, and my mother would take all of us to Thorntons' and they could have a sort of conversation over the radio. He always found such inventive ways to entertain us, though his and Mrs. Thornton's children were long grown and moved to the mainland by then." At this her voice threatened to catch, but she kept it level. "_Sacre_, but he was _un __bon__ bonhomme_."

"He was keeping Lady Marion all these months." He did not have to add more, in truth he would not know what more there might be to add. At this intersection of disclosure and succor the surprising appearance of the Kommandant's driver and the other man did not seem to fit. "I do not know the last time I felt so close to being human," he said, feeling as though he had not quite found the exact words he wished to express himself with.

The confession hung there between them in the candle-wax filled air. He moved to clarify himself. She was finished removing the make-up from both sides of his face, now, and he found himself (as usual) wishing for a pillow to place the scarred side against. "Frail," he explained, "vulnerable."

His trousers came off more easily, assisted by gravity before he brought his legs up and into the bed.

He sighted the tempting outline of her nude figure against the candlelight just before she snuffed both out.

"Don't worry," she told him, her voice pitched as though telling a child goodnight; quiet, calm, re-assuring. "It won't last."

He marveled that, even in her obvious-to-him emotional state over the old man's death, she always knew just the right thing to say.

He thought to tell her that Avia was alive, but exhaustion finally got the better of him, and he drifted off too completely and too quickly to speak further, and the sole good news of the night would have to wait for daylight.

* * *

**SARK - Little Sark Mines -** Johnson had not yet made his appearance.

Marion came-to to feel Carter attempting to investigate and change her bandaging, making use of the unused towel Allen had snatched with such foresight from Barnsdale.

Marion smelled the slight scent of the laundry, there, upon it, and the fragrance struck her as foreign - having no place in these dank mines, put to work on wounds resulting from something as ungenteel as a gunshot to flesh.

"What has Robin gone to sort?" she asked him. Her breath was shallow, and at present would remain so, deeper breaths causing her pain.

Carter looked at her evenly. "The boy, Djak - is not at all a boy."

"Quite. Right," she agreed. "Are you just now all finding this out?"

He did not reply, but pulled some of her improvised coverlet down from where it had covered her to the chin.

His motion brought his face closer to hers and she was able to better study it. "You are angry."

"I am..." he finished the declaration lightly, "taken off-guard."

"How long do you imagine that to last?"

"Couldn't say," he replied, checking her forehead for fever. "_You_ are very casual about it."

"Well, it hardly effects me."

She waited for him to say something further, but he stood to busy himself at the small camp stove cobbled into a larger cooker off in a distant corner. Finally, admitting defeat in waiting for his response, she renewed her questioning. "Does it affect you so deeply?"

He half-squinted as he replied, facing the wall so that she only saw him in profile. "I think Djak _the boy_ had nearly convinced me we were family - of one blood."

"And Djak -"

"_Seraina_."

Marion attempted to shift herself (clumsily so) upon her borrowed berth. Raising herself up broke her out into a sweat. "Seraina the girl. She is an impediment rather than a compatriot?" She huffed with the effort. "In what way does she worry you?"

Carter reacted as though his answer was one any person ought to be well-schooled in. "A man (or boy) can be important to another man in a way...in a way very different than can a woman."

She considered this.

"So it is not that you are in love with her - that you feared you were in love with the boy."

Turning back to where she continued to work at best propping herself, he gave a smile, tinged with ruefulness. "I am not in love with anyone. I do not think I shall ever be. Now see," he chid her, but did not sigh, "that was a very womanish thing to ask. Djak would never have asked that. Djak would just have known."

Marion's eyes widened and rolled, but more from swallowing back the wound's sting than his words. _Her_ words were close-bitten and staccato. "You speak of her as though she is dead."

"But that's just it," he agreed with some vehemence. "Djak is dead. I don't know in what way I can befriend the person who is left." He looked away. "I do not excel at friendship, anyway." He tried not to think of Pedersen, to ask himself yet again if the man had been his friend. "The world we inhabit does not excel at nurturing such bonds with any permanence."

She let a silence fall at that. A considered silence. Somewhere off in the distance of the old mine shaft, water could be heard dripping.

But she could not let it rest for long. With her injury, and Robin's absence, this subject was the one distraction left her. "Aren't you being rather hard about the whole matter?"

"And if your Oxley were a woman?" Carter counter-questioned, barrister-perfect.

She held back a scoff. "...I...don't think we should get on."

A nod of his head in agreement. "So you admit there is a difference."

"Very well," Marion plunged in headlong. "I admit that I have known Djak for a girl for some time now. I only briefly interacted with her while under the impression that she was a boy. And I admit that her gender change effects me not one bit. And though I see the point you wish to make, I think - if you accept it - it will also not affect you, in your relation to her. Unless you _choose_ to let it."

"And so you are again at prescribing romance?" He gave a shallow (but genuine) smile as he sat down his cup and moved toward her. "I tell you, what Djak and I had - shared - was beyond romance. It was - well, I suppose, in a small way it was the finding, however briefly and transitorily, a home."

Well, that was certainly something - with the death of her father (and now Thornton) and the commandeering of Barnsdale by the Jerries - that she could most certainly appreciate.

Carter had walked back over to the cooker to retrieve a kettle of hot water, and arriving back at her side, placed it on the earthen floor at his feet, preparing for his impending aid to her wound.

"Do you think -" she had no idea why she asked it, much less why she asked _him_, or why _now_. Perhaps it was that she had caught in his face something of the wisdom of the world, of the decade or more of additional experience he held beyond her, beyond Robin. Perhaps only that she had found his words in their way, knowing, and her instincts told her that he would be the man to ask. Perhaps it was only that he was nearest, here in the abandoned mine. "Do you think the loss of so much blood could harm a, a baby?"

Carter's hand froze in place on her shoulder, where he was just about to pull away the wadding closest to her skin. "You are expecting a child?"

"Yes. No. I'm not certain. But yes, possibly."

"It is none of my business, of course - and it is certainly ungracious to ask - but do you know if it is Gisbonnhoffer's or Oxley's?"

It was not quite the question she had been expecting, but she answered it without irritation. "How very pragmatic of you to inquire. Well, it would have to be Robin's. There's no - no way it could belong to anyone else."

He visibly relaxed at this.

"But you have not told him - even of your suspicions?"

"I could be wrong. I'm not certain."

Carter looked at her as though she were someone, perhaps, to pity. "I know little enough of medical matters, much less of women's, but if you are far enough along, and lose a baby, rest assured you will know it."

"But I should not mention it until I am sure," she spoke the suggestion as though she expected him to immediately approve it.

At this, Carter gave a concerned quarter-smile. "I am not the man to try and sell on the notion of concealing a baby's imminent birth from its father. No matter how you feel about this, or how you think he will, this is of both your doing, and ought be settled likewise." He nodded his head to the side. "And soon."

She opened her mouth to ask another question, but he beat her to it.

"And _no_. Johnson owes Oxley far more loyalty than he does you. If you ask him, he will tell your secret husband before you have the chance to, and it is unlikely he knows anything at all of female troubles and birth, having been trained solely to keep men alive on the battlefield. Then you will _still_ have both the question of this child and a rabid-mad husband on your hands."

She let his last sentence stand, and asked, "And so Johnson will come shortly and help keep me alive from my 'battlefield' wounding. And then, _then_ I can seek someone out to tell me whether I am to be a mother?"

Carter sort of 'hmmed' under his breath. "One cannot say your life is not exciting, my lady."

And he took off the last layer of bandage, which had, despite his attempt at gentleness, with the drying of blood, fused to her skin, and Marion tried very hard not to scream, though no one but Carter could hear her, down, deeply below, hidden in the sheltering bedrock of Sark.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Heindl Cottage - Cow shed -** "_Fools rush in, where angels fear to tread_..." Mitch Bonchurch had awoken before dawn that morning to hear Tony Martin crooning. But, he discovered, only in his own, solitary head. It felt like a lifetime since he had heard a record, or a radio broadcast - music of any recorded kind. Music other than that made by Eva. Not that he would, by any means, complain over her gorgeous and sweetly pitched voice, singing as she went about the cottage chores, or spent the time necessary to fancy herself up on a trip...away.

And how he did miss her those nights she was away. Not that he was any longer scared of mad, batty Hilda, or her lengthy natural regimens for curing any manner of illness one did not, in point of fact, yet have. Only there was a lonesomeness even in such a packed home, a lonesomeness even in a grown man's bed, which he had become comfortable sharing, of necessity, with Daniel. Occasionally waking to find young Seth had crawled in for a snug cuddle as well. But without the perfect rhythm of her soft breathing, without her Eva-ness, lonesomeness.

"_And so I come to you, my love, my heart above my head/Though I see the danger, there, if there's a chance for me, then I don't care_."

Milking the cow found him daydreaming like any country milkmaid, his cheek to the cow's flank, his hands to the task of emptying her warm, swollen-overnight udder. He imagined how it might be if he could tell Eva - tell them all - that he was actually a lord, well, _would be_ a lord - with an income to match. Not that he thought it would matter to her. She struck him as the sort of girl to love where she loved, no matter the circumstance. But he could only tell them of the reality of his life if the world were no longer as it were (and he was certain it would not always be). Could only tell them of how happy his mother, Sophie, would be to meet them all. Could only then invite them to holiday (with an eye, perhaps, to staying longer) at Bonchurch Downs. He could put Daniel into a special school to broaden the young man's already voracious mind. Find and fund him a private tutor, even.

And he could marry Eva without thought to the fact that she had nothing to bring to a marriage, so well had his uncle and benefactor managed the Bonchurch affairs. He could marry Eva for love.

If only the war, his MI-6-engineered death, his imprisonment and separation from the unit, as well as his irregular incarceration here were not, so unforgettably - so at present insurmountably - in the way.

"_Fools rush in, where wise men never go/But wise men never fall in love, so how are they to know?_"

**...TBC...**

* * *

_Author's Note:_ My ancient PC's word processing program is on the fritz. Therefore, apologies if you find more errors in this chapter than usual.


	41. People who have never been in my kitchen

**SARK - La Salle's kitchen -** Following Allen's direction without at all examining it, Robin walked toward the farmhouse kitchen to see what sort of delivery might have been left for him there.

Not a man to allow himself much energy directed toward the dangers and pitfalls of introspection (particularly not now, not when the war and the Occupation must needs keep him ever-vigilant, decisive, and without danger of swithering), he nonetheless allowed his physical body, at least, to complain of its harsh treatment over the sunless hours he had just spent.

He wanted sleep, and yet he wanted to return to Marion's side. He wanted food, and yet he wanted to have the chance to debrief his men on the night before. He wanted a moment - two moments - alone with his thoughts, to be able to give precedence to himself, and yet, such was not an officer's lot. Not a _good_ officer's, anyway.

He passed through the doorless frame from the hallway into the kitchen. Before him was a space he (and he knew his men) had come to think of as a sort of sanctuary from their mission, from the war. The long, trestle table was no longer set for any meal (farm hours being from early to late, and the early breakfast now but a memory), but the oilcloth table covering was not entirely bare. There, midway between either end, sat a lone man. His face was long, but physically so - not due to any particular expression. His hair, black as jet, mostly. And, unlike the members of the Saintly Six - even La Salle - he was clean-shaven. He sat as perfectly here in this simple home as he might at Buckingham Palace itself, or, should his expertise be called for, Downing Street.

Roger Stoker pulled the sturdy stoneware cup 'of something hot' (he had not dared request further clarification) away from his lips, and placed it sedately into an unmatched saucer the Gypsy had supplied him with before going and taking up silent watch at the nearby kitchen window.

"It was the Tripp, you know, Old Bean," he said, completely casually, to the man who had just entered, surprised to see how well his friend looked - not only for a dead man, but also for a soldier stranded, cut off from his headquarters, for the better part of a year. "I'm sure you confused it for the Goose, or the Dog and Pony, but I lay your mind to rest: it was the Tripp Club at which we were to meet for drinks the Tuesday following your return from France." He could not hold in the sly smile growing across his face.

He had greeted the others, of course - even managing to exchange several moments with Dale before he had had to leave on assignment - but it was Oxley he had worried about - had wished to see - most. He knew him to be competent enough, but yet there was always that memory in the air, that 'used-to-be' of their lives before the war. He had recruited Oxley to the project personally, repeatedly asking him to join long before Robin had shown up and done just that. Stoker had no such pre-service connection with the other men. Oxley had brought in Bonchurch, the others had come to SIS through various avenues, believing various promises. And when the accident had come, and the brass in charge had decided to officially decease the entire six, it was Stoker they sent to sell Oxley on the idea, believing that if Oxley, the (obvious to all) leader of the unit would agree, he would charismatically persuade his fellows with him.

And it had not happened so dissimilarly.

So, Robin, _his_ man. His responsibility. His (if things came out badly) tragic miscalculation. At the sight of Robin in this kitchen, he felt as though it were Christmas, or the days just after. Festive, with a mind to sing a tune, demand the barkeep pour another - pull a cracker and sing _Auld Lang Syne_. But he was a Briton, and hardly raised to such an overflow of emotion. So he simply said, "Instead of waiting for you, it was decided to pay you a little visit."

"Muhammad not coming to the mountain?" Robin managed to get out of his throat without croaking, so dry it had become upon sighting, of all people, old Stoke in Stephenﾒs kitchen.

Stoker looked down into his cup, noting whatever they had given him to drink did not even have leaves left in the bottom to pore over. "Oh, indeed," he agreed, with an exceedingly understated raise of a single eyebrow.

* * *

_What silly men_, Djak thought to herself from where she sat off to the side, able to overhear the two men's reunion while taking her silent turn at the watch. She knew enough from the others to know that this new man, Stoker, was from their government, their military, far away, and that Johnson and the others expected him to fetch them off the island, and away home. Knew that they had neither seen, nor had two-way communication with this Stoker in over a year's time, and that they were each and all exceptionally fond of him. _So why_, she addressed the space inside her head as though it were the two men to her back, _why don't you Gadjo show it?_

There should be singing, a dance between the two men - a celebration in which all the clan would join. Sacred kisses exchanged. And tears. There should be an offering of tears.

* * *

Robin looked at Stoker, feeling for once all the play go out of himself. He had no ready quip, no quick-wit answer to show his stiff upper lip.

His mind could only circle 'round Hamilton, and the lines of "_I walked a mile with Pleasure/She chattered all the way/But left me none the wiser/For all she had to say/I walked a mile with Sorrow/and ne'er a word said she/But oh, the things I learned from her/when Sorrow walked with me!_"

Upon the sight of this man that signaled home and safety, and order - and even, a chap higher up the chain of command to which to (relievingly after all this time) defer - something inside him broke, like an over-wound violin string. He felt surprised the 'ping!' of it could not be heard outside his corporeal form.

It must have shown on his face, for Stoker crossed the room and rounded the table's corner edge to him as though he saw a faint coming on in the sudden alteration of his features.

"God save the King," said Robin, as Stoker arrived to stand opposite him. There were a thousand things he ought to say, to do. A salute, at least, to give. But he could think of only one. His face crumpled in upon itself like used tissue paper.

"I have lost Mitch," he confessed, despair enveloping him.

And they fell upon each other.

* * *

From her perch near the window, not turning around, Djak smiled, satisfied.

* * *

**ALDERNEY - Office of the Kommandant -** "And how _is_ our returned Prince Charming-gone-a-wooing?" Kommandant Vaiser lifted his head from paperwork he was currently approving. "Our little Geis-erella? Was his date last night all he thought it might be and more?"

Diefortner watched his superior closely to gauge what would best be his own response to such a question. It never did to say too much, or to prove too enthusiastic on any point without knowing which way the prevailing winds a la Vaiser were blowing. "_First-Landser_ Ellingheim reports that the Lieutenant did not bring the Lady Marion back to Barnsdale with him," he shared. "There was some commotion during the psychic's performance, shortly after which they disappeared." He considered for a moment, and then chose to add, "it would appear they were making free with both your Guernsey car, and your driver."

Vaiser sighed with exaggerated disappointment. "If only I thought you meant that in a carnal way, Underlieutenant."

The Kommandant laid down the fountain pen with which he had been signing orders. "Like when you told me he had given her a horse, or burnt her barn...and I was so certain - so hopeful - you were making use of some new, English euphemisms I had yet to learn." He let his voice trail off wistfully, like a young girl musing on the dramatic travails of her favorite heroine and lover.

"You would prefer he use force, if necessary, with the woman?"

"I would _prefer_," and here Vaiser let every bit of nasty lodged in his being flood his tone, "he _use force_ anyway. That rusty _door_ to what I suppose one must _imagine_ is Lady Marion's bower won't open on its own anytime soon. It must be _kicked_ in." He gave a slight shiver, never having taken to Marion interpersonally, much less finding her - and what he read as frigidity - sexually attractive. "Makes you wonder about Gisbonnhoffer's mother, don't it?" he asked in hyper-confidante mode. "Ice in her veins - glacier in her girdle, no?"

"Shall I send for the Lieutenant's personal file again?" Diefortner asked, intuiting that the Kommandant would like to review the notes on Gisbonnhoffer's parentage.

Vaiser sniff-sneered. "The idiot coward should take her already. Nothing has been stopping him for months now, not since she was found. For a man who clearly seems to want the little scone-eater so much, he does dither enough. If he's not careful, Diefortner, I've a mind to order camphor slipped into his rations - take away the distraction if he can't," he bellowed, "_conquer_ it."

He looked back to his adjutant, sing-song and instructive. "I meant that figuratively," his head bowed to one side, "of course. As in, 'do the deed, pillage, rape, ruin the girl, leave her good for nothing but the madhouse - lose interest and return to the damn-blasted war!'"

Diefortner kept his eyes on Vaiser, thinking to himself that the Kommandant appeared to wish to school him on things today. So he played along. "Camphor?" he asked, with an air of light confusion.

"Camphor, man. Camphor. Suppresses the sexual urge and all that rises from it. Encourages docility." At this he snorted. "We've certainly a healthy supply here from which to take."

Of course Diefortner, who had often enough filled out requisition forms for the substance, knew this. Knew it was given to each prisoner in his or her meager rations in order to have just such an effect. Knew that if it were consumed over a long enough period of time the women, at least, became permanently sterile. But he also knew there were days the Kommandant enjoyed educating others on such minutiae.

And today was turning out to be just such a day.

* * *

**Treeton Camp Offices -** "You say you brought this to me to sell?" Gisbonnhoffer barked at the island constable.

At this point in what he had meant to be gentlemanly bargaining, Sark's Constable Paxton was beginning to believe his bright idea to hitch a ride to Alderney with the Kommandant's driver this morning in order to bring the ring to a broader market had..._possibly_...been a bad idea.

"And that you found it on Sark - near Le Seigneurie?" The bark did not abate from his voice. Gisbonnhoffer raised the emerald ring between the tips of two of his fingers and turned it over in the late morning light that spilled from his office window. He took a moment to marvel at the tiny proportions of the band that held it all together. How small the circumference, how delicate a finger must needs be to even put it on without having it catch on a knuckle. It would barely sit, perched just even with the tip of his nail, on his own, smallest finger.

"Yes, Sir, Lieutenant, Sir. That is the way of it. Found by Philippe, what works for Sark's Dame near the great house. He never wanders far from there, if at all. It was Philippe as found it, so it had to be, as he said, La Seigneurie - near La Moinerie. Strange things, they say, work their ways up and out of the ground there." For some reason he felt the need to accentuate this. "Always have said it, since I were a child."

"And who else knows of it?"

"Only the _ReichKaptain_ Lamburg, Sir. But he would have none of it. Wouldn't buy _stolen_ goods, he says. 'Probably came from an Islander', he says. Ran me off." Paxton scoffed. "As if a Sarkese - excepting the Dame herself - had money for such a thing."

"Your _ReichKaptain_ is correct, though, Paxton," Gisbonnhoffer made an attempt at smoothness. "This item _does_ have an owner. Me." He made a deliberate motion of placing the ring into his breast pocket and buttoning the flap as if to further secure it there.

Paxton half-choked on his own saliva, his eyes growing large as he began to comprehend what was in the process of happening.

Gisbonnhoffer renewed his questioning. "This man goes nowhere near the sea caves by the harbor at La Creux? You are certain?"

"Never," Paxton shook his head with conviction. "Philippe is half-simple. Frightened of the water. He would never venture so far from his bed." He wanted to raise the question of payment, but the Lieutenant had left him no easy or smooth way to do so.

"Then you may go." Gisbonnhoffer told him, his face already showing signs of thinking on something far-removed from the room they shared, or the man in front of him.

"Perhaps..." Paxton attempted, "something of a finder's fee?" He tried out his best smile.

Brow furrowing as though a gnat were pestering him, Gisbonnhoffer jerked his chin toward the man who had brought him Marion's lost ring, and set his eyes toward the door. "Very well," he told the constable. "I shall refrain from incarcerating you for leaving Sark and coming here without the proper travel papers. If you leave immediately."

Paxton stood frozen in place. He had not arranged any passage back. He had no idea how to locate the Kommandant's driver who had ferried him here. But it seemed very urgent that he return to the port.

To hurry the clearly stunned man along, Gisbonnhoffer added a monotone, "You are welcome."

* * *

Once alone, Gisbonnhoffer felt for the outline of the ring through the fabric of his pocket, his fingers continually returning there even as he attempted to center his mind on the work of the day and the reviewing of typed reports: deaths, attempted insurrections, pounds of concrete mixed and poured, feet of bunkers dug, current prison hospital occupancy.

But his mind swirled with the question raised by the ring, and how it had come to be so very far away from where Marion said she had been taken by the flyer, Thomas Carter. How did spending her time while abducted in a Southern sea cave lead to this ring - something valuable enough that not even a simpleton could mistake it for other - ending up in the North? Within La Moinerie, the old monastery ruin?

He struggled to think of a way Marion might have been confused about where she had been taken over those several days of her kidnapping.

But his need to work logic into the matter, he quickly realized, was like driftwood caught in a whirlpool. Rudderless, out of its depth.

He knew he would not sleep that night.

**...TBC...**


	42. Homefront Italian Front Letters

**SARK - Little Sark Mines -** The Lady Marion had slept most of the day. Night had now fallen, she was told, though within the sheltering depth of the mines one depended upon faith and a pocket watch (or their military-issued wristwatches) to tell one so.

Robin had been delayed at the farmhouse longer than had been expected, and though she had missed him - had wanted to miss him, so rarely they inhabited the same island for more than a few hours - she had not been conscious long enough to truly do so.

Using a crudely improvised crystal set, Carter managed to pull in (even at this depth) BBC Radio (something to do with some inspired engineering magic Robin's Communications Officer Reddy had been able to perform), and she was somewhat energized by having listened, and was feeling ready to tackle her own broadcast and repeat of the news, later.

As the day wore on, Johnson had arrived with Wills Reddy, who had grumbled so much to himself that Marion was nearly to believing the mines were a place, simply, where Robin relegated people he could not deal with at the moment. A sort of waiting room for those condemned to see the headmaster.

But of course she knew better. Strategically these shafts were a defensible point, a perfect storage location, and a haven for a unit who could not, altogether, occupy La Salle's small farmhouse for long without bursting its seams and raising even the generally non-prying eyebrows of Stephen's nearest neighbors.

And when Robin did show, it proved a breathless exchange between the two of them at best. He took time to consult with both Johnson, the unit's medic, and Carter, whose unexpected ear Robin even deigned to bend in collecting information about her recovery thus far, and her present condition.

Unsurprisingly, Robin had not cared for the notion of her returning to Guernsey, and he made no show of hiding it, though he _had_ brought Allen Dale with him (presumably to take them to the launch).

"There is much a-foot at present at La Salle's," Robin had confessed, surprising her with his words to follow, "I can say no more now, but rest certain that I shall tell you all tomorrow evening." His eyes worked overtime to register the sincerity of his remarks.

"What?" she found herself uncharacteristically asking (and feeling uncharacteristically put-out by), "you are not _coming_? You are staying behind?"

"There is a duty - one I've not exercised in sometime - that calls," he gave the arm opposite her injury a squeeze. "I must wait upon a superior, meaning my time at present is not fully my own."

"That is very cryptic," she answered, her voice taking on an edge as she sought the stability of the cavern's rock walls to stay erect as they began the final set of rough-hewn wooden stairs to the surface. The edge had as much to do with her own personal discomfort in the wake of her injury as to do with her frustration in losing out on additional time that could have been spent with Robin that day.

Robin came to a stop on the step just below her, where he had been at spotting her progress, ready to catch her should she stumble or should her at-present short endurance peter out.

He snatched at her swinging hand, bringing her 'round to face him. She was only several inches taller than him, due to the height of the step that separated them.

He kissed her hand. "I send Allen to stay with you during the broadcast, and watch over you before and after. It may include a briefly unpleasant ride in the boot of the Kommandant's auto, and a decided lack of canoodling as your songs play, but he _will_ safeguard you," his eyes shot away, up to the man three steps above her, who had also paused in his ascent.

She sensed her moment, and did not let herself pause to re-evaluate it. Also turning to Allen Dale, she told him - in the tone she might use with an uncooperative or overly-meddlesome servant - "Leave".

The command, and her delivery of it, proved effective enough. He quick-glanced to the side and to Robin, and took the rest of the steps at a bouncy pace, disappearing from view once he'd reached the near top.

"I jest not at all," Robin reminded her before she spoke further. "I have scant hours ahead of me to accomplish much," his mouth formed an apologetic smile. "Will you not be satisfied with a kiss and the promise of meeting as soon as can be?"

She had no idea how, in a sane world, she might have shared such news - certainly announcing the impending births (or conceptions) of her children was not something she had spent any amount of time musing on in her life. She had devoted little enough space to day-dreaming of their possible fathers, after all - much less on how to tell one such news. And here, in such a world of brutality and instability.

But she took a moment and thought of Carter, of what he had counseled her. And then, though she knew it was probably not right, not the way things ought be, she forced herself to imagine she was at telling Carter again. A man she could face with such news. Rather than Robin - a man (despite his personal stake in the matter, despite his uncontested ownership of her heart) she was not sure she could.

"I think I am pregnant," she said, afraid to look directly at him, that the overlay she had imposed on his face of the impartial Carter would not last. As expected, it did not.

"What-" he asked, his words linking together without the usual breaks. His eyes scoured her person, examining even more closely the ad hoc bandages and arm sling from her wounding which covered what there was of her abdomen. "With a child?"

At the risk of possibly tearing up, or even starting a fight were she to speak, she scoffed and replied tartly, "unless there's something rather macabre about your family lineage to which you've yet to confess." Her own words left her with a feeling somewhere between a good blub and the beginning of a tittering giggle.

Before either sound or action could be brought into the full spectrum of being, Robin reached for the sides of her face, in his instantly incited passion almost pulling her entire, wobbly self down upon him - but certainly bringing her lips to his - and kissing her with great depth and ardor.

"Then you have given me more than I could have possibly wished for - " he told her excitedly, veering into non sequitur as he finally pulled away, "Everything I need to convince him." His smile actually broadened.

Using strength that after such a day he barely had at his disposal, he lifted her into his arms and carried her up the final steps to the shaft's opening, whispering his farewell into her ear before departing again for La Salle's, "Go, then, Little Mother, and 'watch the night." He could not stop himself from quoting Arnold as he disappeared into the landscape. "'Come to me in my dreams'," he invited her, "'and then/By day I shall be well again/For then the night will more than pay/The hopeless longing of the day'."

Marion noticed that even Robin's man, Dale, stood with her to wait and listen as his commanding officer foolishly broke out into ill-advised whistling as he navigated the most covert return path to the farmhouse.

It did not seemly nearly long enough before the sound of his whistle, the rustle of his movements, could no longer be heard.

* * *

**LONDON - Vauxhall Cross - Office of Clem Nighten -** Clem Nighten's secretary walked about the usually tidy space occupied by her direct boss and collected the high-level security clearance memos received over the last several days in order to carry them off to where they would be destroyed.

That was how she thought of herself when at work; not Charlotte, not even Miss Lampmere. 'Nighten's Girl,' the other men here referred to her, only a small handful ever having bothered to learn instead her surname by which to designate her.

So, 'Nighten's Girl' picked up the thirteen April memo, confirming that Allied aircraft had begun a series of attacks on German coast artillery units in Normandy. Moments later she added to the stack the communique stipulating how things would be handled to prevent any word (however random) from leaking about the Allies' upcoming plans for invading France. A sharp restriction on diplomatic privileges. Censoring of all communication, and a cessation of code traffic. All pouches to be inspected. Only American, Russian and the Dominion offices to remain exempt.

She sighed. The still-unspecified day in May would come soon enough, when the boys would embark on the planned invasion, boarding ships to ferry them 'cross the Channel to wait for the appointed day and time. At least until then she could look forward to the need to handle (and collect) far less paperwork.

And perhaps, even (if she let herself quietly hope - forbidden to speak of what she knew at her level of security clearance to anyone else), even a beginning to what might prove the end, the terminus for any need of any further war communication whatsoever. _Perhaps_.

Tamping down her stack of memos on the edge of the desk blotter, Nighten's Girl moved with her ever-efficient steps toward the office door, and the document destruction room several floors beyond.

* * *

**Channel Waters between Sark and Guernsey -** Allen Dale, no matter that he was the proud owner of such a vessel as the launch found for him by Vaiser, did not like the water. And what's more, he suspected that the Lady Marion, his current passenger, did not much care for _him_.

Of course his own past actions toward her had not likely gone far to raise him in her estimation. And she was not simple Eleri, whom he might drop a kiss or sweet gesture upon and win her back to his side, no matter how transiently.

He had found that engaging his mind in things other than the dangerous waters churning about them during such a passage did help improve his only-just swallowed back terror. Conversation was generally helpful, especially when German gunships and marine patrols did not appear to offer up their own, dependable distraction.

"Got a girl in trouble once," he announced without preamble from his place at the wheel, knowing that though Marion was trying to appear asleep even the smallest acts of resettling herself gave the ruse away.

"That is certainly not a very pleasant euphemism," he heard her answer, though she had not turned 'round toward him, but remained facing the stern of the boat.

He tried to repair his use of the common expression. "Not that I meant to infer that you...had found yourself in _trouble_, so to speak..."

Here there was a familiar arch-ness to her voice as it carried through the night air to his ears. "You are the type, of course, to eavesdrop."

"Oh, that," he spun it, attempting to downplay his listening-in to her and Robin's final exchange before they exited the mines. He shrugged it off. "Perhaps your little pow-wow was not as quietly rendered as you might like to think."

"And perhaps the skills you valiantly employ for King and Country are not so easily disengaged - even when among your fellows?"

It seemed they were headed for a row straightaway if they kept talking, but after a lengthy pause she asked, in a kinder tone, "so you are a father, then?"

"Naw," he replied, recalling Lizzie's chestnut hair, glossy as molasses, the way the evening's lights at the shilling-a-dance club she worked for sparked in her eyes like Guy Fawkes' Day. "Found myself in a spot of bother shortly after she told me - "

Again, that archness. "With the constabulary, we are to assume?"

"Fortnight on a petty charge, my brother, his mates and me. When I got out I went to find her, but...'no more babe', she says, mysterious-like. 'Over so quick 'doubt the chap she worked for at the hall even knew she'd met with trouble."

"And you were left..?"

He shrugged into the dark night. "'Brother thinks she disappeared it. I were always...afraid to ask." He took a breath in the telling. "But I were left, still me-self. Out of the lock-up, ready for the next challenge. Weren't long after I decided to go straight, and from there, into the Army Service."

Marion spoke to finish the story, her tone low, wistful, all its high-and-mighty vanished. "And you never saw the girl again."

Allen Dale nodded into the night. For good or for ill, he could not dispute that all-in-all, Lady Marion did often have _just_ his number.

"And I never saw her again," he agreed, thinking for a moment that as far distant as Guernsey yet was from them now, Lizzie and whatever possibility the child she had been carrying had held for him, whatever potential future there, was yet farther still, and no longer, really, a place to which he would ever now sail.

* * *

**LONDON - Tuxfarne House -** David Nigel Tuxfarne VI, the Duke of Loughborough, sat in his study and thought he had never quite found himself so mired in a slip-of-the-tongue nightmare as he had that day. And unfortunate, really, that he had no one to whom he could relate the dismaying tale of his own, too-loose (it would seem) lips. Certainly not the Duchess of Loughborough, who could not stomach (even after thirty-one years of marriage) the smoke of his cigar (necessary, really, for any such confessions - integral to his survival of them).

He did not think he could bring himself to lay himself bare to the other chaps at the War Rooms. Time, he felt certain, would more than do that for him.

He sighed. Resign his post? He would hate to do so. It had been an innocent slip, after all, in the presence of an old acquaintance. Or so he protested to himself.

Well, perhaps not just _any_ old acquaintance. She _had_ once been the young woman he had been nicknamed "Lover Boy-o" over. But that had been decades ago. Surely he was the only one left to recall that time, now.

They had been at tea. Awaiting the arrival of the Duchess. Lady Nighten - that is, Lady Miranda (then again, he had never truly stopped thinking of her as Lady Miranda, though she had become Edward's both legally and - easily enough to see - in her heart, long ago) - had been prompt to a fault in her appearance, during which he believed (according to his social secretary) they were set to discuss some charity or Red Cross plan of her orchestration. As they waited for his wife, and the establishment's staff held their tea, he embarked on small talk to pass the time.

In truth, he was not even sure the wording that he had used, or to what he had been referring at the time in the broader picture of their conversation. Only that he had casually referenced the fact that Edward, Lord Nighten - Lady Miranda's until-recently husband - was dead.

Of course this was not generally (outside SIS and the War Rooms) known, and certainly not a published fact. British Intelligence, after all, was not publicly known to be equipped to know or verify _anything_ about the occupied Channel Islands. But their son, Clem Nighten ,had been told (though some many, many weeks after intelligence had discovered the fact), and Tuxfarne had assumed, naturally, that young Nighten had quietly informed his mother.

However, it had quite suddenly and disturbingly become apparent that he had not.

With her taking in the knowledge of her husband's passing, a haze of sorts came over Lady Miranda. Gone was her usual, delightful mode of expression, her charming animation, her perfect posture and presentation. And when, a moment later, that haze had passed, nothing that he could immediately recognize as Miranda seemed to remain. It was as though she had woken from a fitful, restless sleep that had lasted a decade. Her eyes blinked slowly, unreliably. Her mouth seemed to work, but emitted no audible sounds, and the beauty that even at her age still seemed such an essential part of her person deserted her.

He had a terrible a moment of thinking to himself that he had agreed, somehow, to the taking of tea with Dickens' Miss Havisham on the day she discovered her fiance was not coming.

Miranda seemed, instantly, as old as a wizened Covent Garden beggar woman standing in the rain, heedless of the weather. A woman treated harshly by life, whose face showed every path sorrow and misery might tread upon it.

It was certainly not the face one chose to wear to tea. When she abruptly stood to go he felt no compulsion to stop her, rather, wondered if he ought to offer himself as someone for her to lean upon to get to her waiting car.

But he felt, horrifyingly, no connection to the woman beside him. She was no longer the captivating, Aphrodite-of-a-girl he had - even at twenty-seven - so desperately tried for a chance with. No longer the pleasant acquaintance to which she had receded in later years.

This was an utter stranger to him, someone he had made so by his own blunder. The things for which he had so long admired her stripped away by his own, mis-placed words.

As the car door shut upon her and drove away, he wondered if he would ever see her again. And if he did, whether it would be a meeting with the Miranda of old, or with this new, ancient creature to which he had no bond (social or nostalgic), and with which he shared no past. And yet which he had somehow, bunglingly, fathered.

* * *

**ITALY - at the foot of Monte Cassino and its Benedictine Monastery - Allied Command Hut - U.S. Fifth Army -** "G'won, now," urged the Limey.

"See if he won't put up his kid sister's address!" came as a boisterous shout from the Canada Corps' leader.

"Stupid Canuck," barked Fred Otto's American counterpart, not bothering to bring his Queens' attitude down even a notch - particularly during such a heated moment in a poker game. "He'll never do it!"

"Care to make wager on that?" asked the Pole in his halting, but easily understandable, English.

Of course, his own American counterpart in command was a Polack himself - not that far removed from the old country - which made distinguishing one from another a bit more complicated, since U.S. 5th Army Lieutenant Colonel Fred Otto had not bothered with learning any of their names, and as they sat around playing cards on a old crate the light was such he could not read from off their uniforms had he wanted to do so.

The Kiwi commander, always with a strict concentration for the game, cleared his throat and adjusted his sizeable wrestler's shoulders, gaining the immediate attention of every man not yet 'out' of the hand.

Fred Otto pretended to bite at his lip in consideration. "Tell y'all what I'm-a gonna do..." He slipped his hand in his shirt pocket, ignoring the rest of its contents and settling on a particular, by-now well-worn letter. "Got me this here letter," he held it up to the light, hoping to make it more desirable in his hands (he was, after all, in the midst of a losing streak, and he needed them to let him use whatever he had as stakes to raise).

"But not yer wee sis'," assumed the Limey.

"Oh, it's ole Bessie again, is it Freddy-boy?" his counterpart asked.

"And this Bessie, she is pretty girl?" the Pole asked.

"She's just about as fine a jumper as I've ever seen," Fred answered.

"A fine jumper?" the Limey scoffed with a slick grin. "You talk about women as though they were horseflesh, Otto, and you a dealer in it."

"Slender ankles, graceful as a willa branch in spring. Legs clear into next week." He could tell they could almost see her figure emerge from the swirls and twists of smoke their individual cigarettes were merging into above the crate.

"And the rump?" grunted the Kiwi.

"Oh, she's a fine seat on her," Fred assured him. "Just the right amount of give." And he knew he had them. They'd let him buy his way into raising and calling, for the chance at Bessie's letter and her address so that they might write in hopes of getting a letter of their own. And he may just have turned his luck, to win this hand.

"'_Temporary failure_'," the Canuck attempted to joke, referring to what headquarters had chosen to name the Allies' ongoing inability to take the hill that seemed to overshadow every moment of their lengthy (and increasingly bloody) encampment here. "We'll have to pauper him next time if we want to get our hands on that address for his sister."

"'_Temporary failure_'?" Fred repeated, choosing to answer the reference in regard to the siege, rather than in regard to his protecting his own sister from unsolicited mail penned by hardened soldiers. "I'll wager any man among you right now: we'll own that hill before May twentieth."

"_This_ May?" his counterpart quipped, his mouth ever as loose as if he had been at drinking. "Or next? Am I to make odds on May '44? Or '45?"

The other men laughed, though they knew the joke was on them, on the troops under their commanded, and the thousands of others they had ordered to their deaths in this unbreakable siege.

Still, every man present agreed to partner him in his wager.

His prospects, it seemed, were indeed looking up.

"Good girl," he sent thanks out in his mind to Bessie Queenland, making a mental note to write the next morning to inform her of whomever would win her letter (assuming he, himself, did not win it back), and that she might soon need expect a second correspondent based here, (at least for the time being) in Italy.

* * *

**London's West End - Mayfair - Nighten Family Georgian town house -** Even the staff had little call to realize the master's rooms - his bedchamber and adjoining study - still from time-to-time entertained guests over the course of Edward, Lord Nighten's nearly five year absence. Rather, a single guest.

It was, in truth, only the butler Ettlestone who had any notion that, were she unable to be found elsewhere, it was Lady Miranda who stole away to the now closed-up set of rooms. Lady Miranda who with regularity removed the white sheeting from atop the small, cherrywood secretary (compared to the larger, more ornate desk of his Lordship's below in the library) and borrowed its pen and pot to write. What, he did not know. But he kept her secret, without her having ever asked him to do so, without her having issued any orders or spoken any confessions on the subject at all.

When the young master's wife, Claire, had inquired about her mother-in-law's whereabouts that afternoon, he had smoothly allowed her to think, simply, that Lady Miranda was indisposed in her private suite of rooms, and would not be seeing visitors - even family - or taking her meals in the dining room, for the day's duration. He said nothing at all about the fact he knew she was presently sitting at Sir Edward's secretary, doing or managing whatever it was she clearly felt those rooms continued to require of her.

* * *

She sat, unable to see anything before her: not the exquisite decoration, pitch-perfect for this male-centric room. Not the box of letters she had taken out from a drawer. Nothing but Tuxfarne's lips, over and over repeating the words she had not expected to hear. That Edward had died. Without her. Away from home. Away from her. That any moment of contrition, of explanation by her to him had been robbed from her forever.

That the letters in the box she had taken out were never to be read by him. The first chronologically, still bearing the Royal Mail's seal stating that it was undeliverable as of late June 1940. A consequence of the Occupation. No mail, no phone, no telegraph. No communication.

Still she had written - but no longer posted - the letters. Letters to her husband, to the man she loved. They would read them together, someday, she had supposed. Upon his return (or her ability to journey to Barnsdale, to him). They were letters of no great consequence, she knew. They spoke of London, of life here, asked questions about life there, on his island. They had become her way to continue their chats, once held intimately in his bed after the rest of the house had gone to sleep, their Marion a floor below, poring over her books, continuing her father's work even as he rested from it.

She thought of burning them to ash in a passion. She thought of pressing them into the folded hands of his corpse, only to realize there would be no body, no funeral. No memorial. That even in death, something as simple as having his inanimate self here, nearby, was to be denied her.

She thought on this a moment further and pulled open a second drawer, withdrawing a leather-bound copybook, the first half of it heavy with Edward's familiar handwriting. She ran her fingers across the old script.

Taking up a pen, she wrote the day's date.

"_My darling husband, lord of my heart_," she began, "_I have lost for myself, even, it would seem, the honour of being your widow_." As she continued on, writing about her day, her disastrous encounter with the Duke of Loughborough, she paid no heed to the tears that fell, puddling upon the page and blurring the peacock blue ink that was always her husband's particular request whenever she ordered from the stationer's.

It would not be the last time she would have need of subjecting this particular copybook thus.

* * *

**SARK - La Salle's Farmhouse -** Stephen La Salle shared the closed parlor with Iain Johnson, returned for the moment from the mines. Neither knew how long John might be able to stay, and with the arrival of Roger Stoker (now in the kitchen with Robin), all of the unit felt the peculiar pressure of time more acutely, as their imminent rescue from this place seemed more assured than ever.

Certainly that was the very topic Robin and Stoker even now planned out across the farmhouse's trestle table.

The work of taking Stephen's dictation was not laborious, nor was his letter (which Stoker had agreed to carry) lengthy.

"Write it for me, John," Stephen had asked. "And I shall sign as I can."

"But is it safe, Stephen," John had begged the former rector, "is it safe to give yourself away so? When Stoke himself asked that you keep Louise's name from the salutation, and refrain from addressing it to her - at risk of exposing you to suspicion and harm, were he to be caught?"

"Understand, John," Stephen said, his voice slowed with deep emotion, "I cannot write the words she will see, I can only dictate them. Across such a distance, everything between her and I must needs use a proxy. My signature, my mark, if you will - it's all I can gift her with. The solid knowledge that I have touched this paper, as surely as her hand wrote the diary entries you and Djak read faithfully to me each day. The thought of giving her that assurance warms my heart more than I could easily express."

"'Tis a rare union ye two possess," John remarked, as ever startled by the depth and endurance of their relationship - though he had never met Stephen's wife, other than through her writings, her possessions that still haunted her once-(and hopefully future) home.

"And will _you_ ever marry, John?"

"I lived alone before the war, once me mam passed. Long days into nights working the mines. I doubt I've ever been seen as much of a catch, and myself, not given to fishin' - in that respect."

"And the others?"

"Dunno. Robin's least suited for it, but most likely to have a go at it, seems. Royston's wed, for what it's worth, and Wills is hardly in a position at present to imagine such. But now, Allen has always claimed with deep conviction to be saving himself for a Rockette."

"A Rockette?" Stephen asked at the unfamiliar term. "Whatever is it?"

John shrugged. "From what I can best make out, a dance hall girl in New York City. Seems he's an Auntie Annie in nearby Scarborough who stitches costumes for them. 'Claims a Rockette is an endless pair of legs knit to the face of an angel."

Stephen laughed at the description that sounded so of Allen. "That seems a rather gruesome depiction."

Johnson gave a gruff chuckle. "Does make one wonder where the finger is to wear the wedding ring."

Stephen fell silent at the joking, not because he did not approve, but because he mind returned again to the task at hand, seemingly insurmountable. To condense the content of nearly five years into a brief note. He pulled out the bowl of his clay pipe from his workshirt's dress pocket and rubbed at it as thought shining it between his fingers.

"Write this, John. Begin: _God bring this to you, God find you well. I remain, 'Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed...(for we walk by faith, not by sight)_.' New paragraph: _You fade not from my memory, nor from my future hopes_. Let it dry a moment, now, but only just." Stephen rose from his chair, "Now hand me the unfamiliar pen, and we shall see what nonsense I might commit to paper and yet call it my name."

* * *

Off in the kitchen, Roger Stoker was again sharing with Robin Oxley his orders per the mission. "I will stay tonight, but tomorrow night is my rendezvous. Where I have hidden the launch among the caves there are also supplies - generous supplies; stores and provisions - medicine, even - equaling the weight of two grown men, for those that will be left behind."

Suspicion was thick in Robin's response. "Left behind?"

"Orders are you are to return with me, and one other - of your choosing. The boat will hold no more." Stoker's eyes strayed to the spot so recently inhabited by the Gypsy La Salle sheltered here. "_Military_ personnel only." He waited for what he knew would be Robin's (rightly earned) protest. Knowing he would support it, though be unable to capitulate to it.

"So my lads are to be scuppered here, with only a Boxing Day token from home, left without a leader - again stranded?" He scoffed. "You see how penned in we are here, Stoke. We will shortly all be dead men for real, ere we are not careful. _And_ lucky."

It was not the first time Stoker had had to think over Robin's very natural and right response to MI-6's harsh-but-necessary directive. But it was the first time he had had to feel the hopelessness of it. "If I could, I would happily stay and let you take two with," he pleaded. "Yet, I know too much. Should I be captured, 'twould be far more damage I could do in breaking than every man-Jack of you here."

Ever sidetrackable by his curiosity, Robin queried, one eye narrowed, examining Stoker, "And so there is big news afoot?"

"Old Bean, I can't tell you much while we're yet in-country. But I can say this much: the day is sooner than you can likely imagine that there will no longer be any boats - enemy or friend - arriving or departing these islands."

"A blockade?" Robin caught his breath. That could only mean one thing: ensuring the safety of an invasion force. "And we are meant to be shut out? Trapped beside our tormentors?"

Stoker said no more, but did not deny Oxley's quick-follow logic.

"We've six and a half good codebooks to send home with you," Robin spoke to break the impending silence, to prevent himself from tempting Stoker toward an indiscretion where things Top Secret were concerned.

"You've dated them with when you acquired them?"

Robin nodded, knowing that though they were not the most-current in use, SIS could still use them to check against transmissions made around those dates, and come steps closer to breaking codes still in use by the Jerries.

"They are kept at the mines," he shared.

His mind tugged at him, but only momentarily, that he was about to make a wrong choice, motivated by interpersonal dislike rather than clear-headed strategic thinking. "Royston will go," he added to their plans, his mouth almost rebelling and saying the more-correct choice of 'Carter' in Royston's place.

The man had survived a pitiless ordeal as a prisoner. His time in the Alderney camps may well have provided him with intel they had none of them yet heard. He was, if it were to be believed, a crack pilot recovered enough now to return to flying. And if an invasion were truly coming, fighter pilots would be valuable as gold.

He was wanted by the enemy, who knew his face. His presence here endangered them all, even Stephen - despite Carter's current disguise. But still Robin could not bring himself to say the name, to ship the man home.

"He's the best memory of our lot," Robin spoke to recommended his choice of the unit's career sailor, though Stoker had not acted as though he needed convincing. "Once we're done here, I'll instruct the others to share with him again anything of use they might recall; a full-debrief. We'll have his head so swimming with reconnaissance about these islands, he'll likely capsize your launch before you meet up with your sub."

Stoker laughed. "It's settled, then," he agreed. "Roys for brains, and you for...?" he deliberately cut off his sentence, expecting Oxley to wittily finish it for him. Instead, the other man grew quiet. Had he been smoking one, his mouth moved in such a way that it reminded one of a man chewing on an unlit cigarette, rolling it back and forth across his teeth and tongue.

"No, Stoke," Robin Oxley said with a faint shake of his head. "Four years in, and I have found my war." He raised his eyes to his friend. "And it is here." He took a breath. "Orders or no orders I'll not make sail from this place 'til the Jerries do first."

The two men examined one another with all the tension of two cowboys just before a shoot-out.

_Bollocks_, thought Stoker, caving to Oxley's determined (challenging, even) stare, making no effort to conceal the heavy frown line growing upon his temple. This, in all of his planning, he had not foreseen.

**...TBC...**


	43. Insubordination, Bedroom Epiphanies

**SARK - La Salle's Kitchen -** "I could rightly have you clapped in irons, you know," Roger Stoker threatened levelly, grasping at any straw of which he could think to get Oxley in his boat, bound for England. His face twisted into a grimace not unlike those brought on by unexpected dyspepsia. "'Tis the usual punishment for disobeying a direct command - when 'flogging 'round the fleet' 's not practical." The muscles around his left eye hardened and he gave a sharp thump of his fist against the wooden trestle table, causing his empty stoneware cup to startle nosily in its mis-matched saucer. "Do not think," he exhaled strongly through his nose, "I could not persuade the others to help me do it - see you restrained and shipped home as ordered. Johnson, at least, I could count upon agreeing with me, and Reddy - quite possibly I could win over Reddy..." But his voice (and even his conviction in the matter) began to lose steam.

Unit 1192 had, at times disturbingly to the high command, ever been more loyal to each other - and most importantly to their commanding officer Oxley - than they had ever been to the brass in Home Office. They rather seemed to believe they served the King directly (even, perhaps, autonomously), and any bureaucrat or the like who got in the way of what they had well perceived their duty was, was, frankly, as much an impediment to them as the enemies which they fought with deadly (and stealthy) force. A conviction, while not convenient, that had nonetheless served them more than well - rather, outstandingly - when in the field, when self-dependent.

When returned home between missions it had, rather predictably, resulted in ill-timed insults and the occasional bout of fisticuffs - both in and out of uniform, with only Bonchurch among them, generally, willing to attempt to clean things up and smooth them over on behalf of the lot afterward with apologies and public mea culpas equal parts humility and contrition.

Good-natured contrariness bubbled up in Oxley's eyes. "Perhaps you'd best have those irons at the ready, then, Old Man, as it will hardly be the last directive I've ignored over these last months," Robin answered him, his challenge more friendly than antagonistic.

Realizing he should not have needed such a reminder, Stoker's mood pivoted instantly toward the sympathetic. "No one's to hold that against you, of course. You lot, out here without direction, without an outlined mission, only half-a-plan. If fear of an official reprimand's what's keeping you from returning with me -" he meant to finish with, 'you needn't fear it, but know every chap at MI-6 not only reveres what you've managed to do, but has nearly elevated you one and all to legendary status. The ones that know about 1192, that is.' But Robin cut him off.

"I've gotten married," he said, one finger drawing casually on the oilcloth's design, careless and meandering, as one might while wasting an afternoon at a sidewalk cafe.

"You've what?" Stoker's expression hardly knew what cast to take on.

Oxley's tongue came out to rub contemplatively at the point of an eyetooth. "Entered into a nuptial contract without the approval or assent of my direct superior."

Crikey, this _was_ irregular. More so, even, that it was Robert Oxley sitting here telling him this. Though male, even Stoker knew of the man's next-door-to-caddish reputation pre-War. Certainly he had had no reason to expect this old dog to turn to new tricks whilst enduring an Occupation.

The horror and confusion on his face must've shown.

"It has been kept secret, though. Only Stephen, the Gypsy, the pilot Carter, and...my wife know of it." Here his tone had veered more toward apologetic.

"But it was solemnized and registered?"

Robin nodded. "In an unusual way, but, yes. And there have been other, smaller infractions."

"By all means, save them!" Stoker pled. "Save them for your debrief!" He slapped his own hand at his chest. "My heart cannot likely take many more. So it is this..._wife_ who stands as the reason you will not return? Your dislike of being separated from her...?" Stoker began to work up a logical syllogism in his head involving the comparison of Robin's newlywed hesitance to that of any other serviceman's back at home.

But Robin answered him before his argument was fully constructed. "Yes," he said. "And no, not in the way you think. It is not that I fear being parted from her. It is that I now know I cannot live happily at present having her near." His face and tone had lost all pretence of joking or playfulness. "Stoke, she is going to have a child, and I need -"

Now it was Stoker's turn to interrupt him. "No," he said, denying his unasked question, though without great passion. "Military personnel only." He shook his head as if to get Robin's petition out of his ears like unwelcome water after a bathe in the sea. "I cannot even imagine the reception I might receive back at the rendezvous were I to have an expectant Islander girl with me in the place of you. I am not sure they would allow me - allow us - onboard." His mind hurt with the thought of it.

"No, Stoke." It was Robin's turn to shake his head. "That's it. She's _not_ an Islander girl. And to look at her, you'd not know she was yet carrying a babe."

Stoker thought up the strongest statement he could make to once-and-for-all silence Robin on this unpleasant request. He slapped his hand to the table in hopes of giving it an air of finality. "I would not agree to take this woman, were you to convince me she were the very Nightwatch herself."

From where he had been leaning in to their discussion, Oxley gave himself a push away from the table, his chair sliding back about a foot from table's edge, and leaned back in his chair, as though he were ready to relax, possibly light an 'after-dinner' smoke. "I would very much appreciate it," he said, "if you ceased referring to my wife as 'this woman'."

Stoker let out his pent-up breath. He had never liked rowing with Oxley, no matter how pedestrian the subject. One always came out (whether justified or not) feeling like a spoiled sport. "Well I cannot very well address her as Vicountess Huntingdon, the Lady X, now can I? Or are we to again go over the details of your title being suspended at the moment in the interest of your government's necessary secrecy? You are, after all, a dead man. Dead men are not meant to run about the countryside marrying and producing heirs. It is, at best unseemly. If not perverse." He ended on what he thought a well-deserved huff.

"Very well," Stoker's articulated censure of his behavior did not seem to have dimmed Oxley's mood in the least. "You may consider her my _widow_, the Dowager Vicountess Huntingdon, a lady in her own right as well as in mine:" here his jaw slightly cocked, ready to enjoy the reveal. "The Lady Marion, born Nighten."

"By the...by the..." Stoker could think of nothing he knew strong enough to swear by. "Clem's sister. Trothed to a Jerry, we'd heard. So, not true, then."

"Oh, no," it seemed Robin had to disagree with even the most facile of his statements. "Most certainly true. Possibly she still is - engaged to the bugger, that is. Oh, and if you're at collecting Marion-based intelligence," Robin motioned with his finger as though he were instructing a stenographer what to put down, "she is, in point of fact, the very Nightwatch incarnate." He had, perhaps, never looked so pleased with himself.

Long minutes passed where Roger Stoker's brain attempted to right itself from where it had been set a-tilt.

Robin did not interfere by speaking further.

"You are the most monumental pain in my arse, you know," he finally said. "You will not come. I cannot easily make you, and here you go, putting forth (in the body of one person) Clem Nighten's sister, the daughter of one of our greatest statesmen of the present time, _your_ with-child wife, and the Nightwatch herself." He let out a sigh. "I see in my very near future courts-martial for this." His eyes snapped back to Robin.

"Oh, it gets better, Stoke. She's been to the Alderney camps. Knows the appetites and proclivities of the officers stationed here. She's spent the long years since July '40 in the very belly of the beast. You and yours ask the right questions and there's no telling what you might find out from her."

"But will she go without you?" Stoker leapt to the immediate question at-hand. "Can you so convince her?"

"There will be no need for convincing," Robin promised him, "She will not go to please me, nor to save herself," here, a passion began to bloom in his voice. "She will go for the babe. She will go to safeguard the future."

Knowing far more than the average British citizen the hardships and deprivations the Islanders here daily faced, Stoker commiserated. "These islands are no place for birthing or growing children."

"They are no places for the weak, or the innocent," Robin agreed.

And with this, Stoker finally understood. "And so _you_ will stay." He allowed himself the start of a circumspect smile.

"Yes," Oxley nodded slowly, a man who had of necessity long ago found himself parted from both weakness and innocence. "I will stay."

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Barnsdale Estate -** _Had he slept? He could not be sure. Would he ever sleep again? The answer was even less certain_. He wished for a moment that he had taken time upon arrival to review the grand house's maids, time to select one to help with the ever-tightening pressure that seemed to have his body in a vise.

All these people here were his, of course, to do with as he pleased, to serve him as he pleased. He did not doubt they may have been somewhat taken aback upon his arrival with such an unusual collection of soldiers, men who rarely saw light beyond Alderney's camps' barracks. Men who certainly had never visited here. But he knew they would best do the job. Sweeping the house, finding what might be hidden, ransacking - if necessary - secret spaces holding the answer he was looking for.

Not that he knew of a certain what that answer was. Only, that he felt strongly that it must be here, held within Marion's house, her home and sanctuary.

He had commanded they begin with the servants' quarters, where they had largely produced the usual contraband one might expect to find in such a place even in peacetime: some pornography among belongings in the men's hall, the odd piece of silver cutlery in the bureau of a girl known by all to enjoy the taking of things, but who never took them outside of the estate, nor tried to sell them.

It had been in the butler's pantry the most damning find occurred. A crystal set - an improvised radio receiver, exquisitely placed among items so everyday and beneath anyone's notice had it not been for the unannounced search performed by such seasoned professionals it would have likely gone unobserved in any of their lifetimes.

"Shall I arrange to have him taken away, Sir?" Ellingheim had asked, expecting swift punishment for the guilty party.

"Don't be ridiculous, _First-Landser_," Gisbonnhoffer had scolded him. "Without Clun," he named the estate's butler, whose booty the set clearly was, "who would run my household? Bring my tea? Speak to my cook? You?" he spat out. "Bring it here to me," he thought of the morning's coming Nightwatch broadcast, "and see that Clun receives the fright of his life for having concealed it."

'Here to me' of course meant Marion's rooms. Rooms in which he had not spent ever a great deal of time. Small snippets, of course, though mostly when she was absent. He had never noticed her bed concealed a small trundle. Never been able to take the time to smell each of the exotic soaps on hand in her oh-so-feminine lavatory. To run his bare hand along the porcelain edge of the claw-footed tub and imagine her sunken within it, only shoulders, pink from the water's heat, peeping out from the bubbles and bath salts he'd also located among her abandoned toiletries.

Her desk had been one of the first places he'd chosen to look. But beyond things within it that brought a feeling of wistful hope from within him, nothing seemed strange or out-of-the-ordinary.

After the bath, he'd turned his attention to the armoire, cattycorner of the bed. Still filled with her clothes, it proved too dark to see effectively into its depth. He began to empty it.

The ring that seemed - unless he were able to discover something to the contrary - to condemn her weighed heavily in the breast pocket of his shirt. His work here, and the emotional state it had put him into, sent his body's core temperature soaring, to the point he had removed his uniform coat and dropped his braces, unbuttoning the first four on his uniform shirt, revealing the standard-issue undershirt he wore beneath, the ring's weight pulling the starched shirtfront heavily to the side.

Dress after dress he pulled out on their padded, scented hangers, tossing them behind him onto the bed where his uniform coat had landed first. Then came the meticulously lined drawers of intimate garments mingled in with perfumed sachets, foundation wear and filmy, diaphanous nightgowns that one would swear were stitched by and for faery creatures with fingers nimble as water sprites in tales meant to charm _kinder_.

It became increasingly hard not to clutch at them for long moments, the unfamiliar softness of the fabric spilling through his hands like silken sand, rather than discard them onto the bed and into the growing heap of couture.

Finally, there was an end to it. The space was bare, open to him. He examined it closely, pressed for hidden compartments, places for concealment no matter how small. But all he was left with were five water marks on the wood deep in the back corner, a clear testament from their varying shapes that some previous owner or tenant of the house had used the cabinet for stowing his liquor quite differently than in its current role.

He felt exhausted, uncertain whether to allow himself relief that nothing had been found, or dread that he had simply not yet looked deep enough.

Though the bed did not look conventionally welcoming with its mound of clothing, some still upon their hangers, he allowed himself to sink down into it, among it, imagining that it embraced him, enfolded and accepted him. At first he lay upon it tentatively, flat upon his back, only his hands tactile-side to the fabrics he lay among. As his thoughts churned on, his doubts and misgivings on ebb, he turned upon his side as a lover might to come face-to-face with their partner. His exhaling breath blew across the fragile fabrics, waves rolling in upon an intimate shore.

Perhaps he fell asleep, perhaps he only fell into a deeper, more surreal trance. The pattern on the rooms' curtains began to waver and bleed into itself until he recalled a story - though not much of its specifics - told by the Kommandant of a man caught out by having concealed something in a hung tapestry. Before he could even fully process how he might best proceed with such a search, he was to the sturdy rod that crowned the picture window. His hands grasped their way up, along the rich French fabric toward the ceiling until they could no longer find purchase, and with a gnash of his teeth and a grunt that was more of a growl, he ripped the first panel in two, making it easy to see between the lining and decorative fabric that displayed in the room. _Nothing_.

Only growing more frustrated, he yanked the second curtain down and rent it in a similar fashion. This time, _something_.

He grabbed the object, paper in nature, and dashed over to the nearest table lamp so that he might study it more closely. He was not immediately sure what he had found. And even when he had puzzled it out, it neither served to easily vindicate nor to convict its owner.

The paper was photographic in nature, and had apparently at one time been far larger than its current size of two by three inches or so. But it was irregular in its dimension because it had (as the charred edged well-showed) been rescued from a fire. The chemicals from the photographic developing process had reacted to the intense heat, causing no small amount of bubbling and distortion. What was left was, in essence, the now incomplete photograph of someone's eyes. A man's. Try as he might, as much as they stared at him, their expression whimsical, care-free, Gisbonnhoffer could not wrest from his mind the feeling that they were recognizable. Not familiarly so, but certainly they were known to him, they were eyes he had encountered.

He continued to stare into them as he sat down hard upon the over-stuffed bedside chair. He noted a small tremble in his hand that held this new evidence.

_Marion's husband_, he thought. For who else could it be? A once-cherished photograph thrown in the fire upon some tiff - perhaps at their parting. Discarded and meant for destruction when a hand - Marion's hand - had reached to save what could yet be saved of it. Had she been wearing _his_ emerald at the time? This ring now returned to his possession? Had one of her hands been reaching into danger's path to salvage a promise, even as her other wore the jeweled evidence of a new vow? To him?

_Could he believe her so duplicitous?_

Yes. With every passing moment he was trying to learn himself that he ought consider nothing, really, beyond her. Even so, lying to him about her feelings, about her romantic status was hardly a crime in which the Reich was interested. Personal betrayals they catalogued, in hopes of manipulating the transgressor in future, but they rarely punished.

And this man's eyes (he further studied on them) did not (or did they?) look of the disappeared flyer's. Eyes that seemed to laugh at him. Eyes that...eyes that unsettled him. Could this be the flyer in happier times? Could the grim - unbreakable even by _die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_ - pilot Thomas Carter 2-2-6-5-4-8-3-2-3-6-Z have worn such an expression in pre-War times? For Marion, his wife? His lover?

Were _he_ Marion's unknown husband would it then explain the emerald ring being on the opposite end of an island from where he had been led to believe she had lost it?

Gisbonnhoffer could hear the attachment of men he had brought with him now at work, distantly, now in the larder.

He needed time to think, space to breathe, somewhere less tainted with...Marion.

* * *

**Heindl Cottage -** Daniel Heindl look into the pot at the pitch he was in process of distilling for his mother and one of her various remedy cures. It was a mindless enough process, not requiring a great deal of his concentration or intellect. Simply, watch the pot that it doesn't boil at too high a temperature, mind the fire beneath that it stays where it was placed. 'And by all means, Boy' she would always, needlessly warn, 'keep it well away from the house and wee ones!'

The smell was not terrible (he rarely sat too close to the pot), but it did usually keep the others at a distance, and gave him some version of a room of his own, however temporarily.

He had spread out about him, upon the dry ground (he would not have risked them so had it been even slightly damp), what stood as his body of work. Sketches in various states of completion and showing various levels of competency in that craft. The penciled one of his father had grown so dim and inexact, the paper fragile from repeated erasings (he never could quite seem to capture the man, stopping when he believed he had, only to run across the drawing again and feel it was so wrong he must erase the bulk of it and start over new. Only recently he had decided that was the thing: the quality about this man, so elusive that even _Mere - _his own wife - could not capture him and hold him to her for long).

The one of Eva was a rarely seen moment of her introspective. He looked to one of his two most recent: _Monsieur_ Miller, their enforced guest and labourer.

He well recalled the tenor of the moment as he was lining in Mitch's face, uncharacteristically clouded with anger, spitting out his disgust with Seth's father (though he had no idea whom he might be) for leaving Eva so, with such a burden - not only of a child, but in the grip of a judgmental society. _How could the man feel no guilt?_ Mitch had bemoaned. _No remorse in abandoning his own son - to say nothing of his son's mother?_

Well, guilt. That was something not unfamiliar to Daniel. Though he said nothing of it (nor could he, unable to articulate understandable speech as a consequence of his deafness), he had lived with a deep guilt every day since the island's children had been evacuated in June of 1940.

The Heindl's place had been saved, their meager bag packed. Only _Mere_ would stay behind.

It was but just prior to their departure that the news had come to them: leaving the island to seek shelter in England from the coming invasion force would offer protection for them, but only of a kind. They could find no guarantee that they five would be kept together. Only Eva and Seth would be similarly placed - if possible - due to his young age. And it had been made clear that once they landed he, Daniel, would be assuredly taken and placed in an 'appropriate' and 'discreet' facility for the deaf, blind, and otherwise socially outcast.

No one had asked _him_, in all the arguing and shouting and decision-making that went on that night between _Mere_ and Eva. No one had consulted _him_ to see if it was not a sacrifice he might be willing to make for the others. If it was even something he felt he minded. The notion was declared out of the question. It had been decided, without his input. As bad as separation from the others might be, they might as a family have endured that, but to have him treated as less than himself, as less than a person - hidden away and handled like something next door to Nature's mistake - this no Heindl would tolerate.

They would stay. Daniel would stay with them. The Nazis would be easier to fight - to withstand - as a family entire. He would go on to live as he always had: free (as free as any other Islander under Occupation Code), able-bodied (as he most-certainly was), expressing himself as he saw fit, among his kin.

And to suffer under the overlord's thumb. With thanks to Eva's certain charms, not as greatly as other Islanders, certainly. But privation and isolation found their ways into the Heindl cottage nonetheless, not to mention the unpleasant fact of life that was collaboration.

He looked over to the photograph of Seth he had borrowed from its place on the cottage wall. He was at trying to render his nephew upon what scanty paper he had left, using half-crumbling charred coals from when the pitch fire had been cool to the touch this morning. More now on the tips of his fingers than within his grip.

Knowing the child too well to think he might coax Seth to sit for him, he had resorted to copying the print. Actually, he thought it was going quite well. He wondered absently if there mightn't also be English schools that taught and housed not only the crippled, but also the gifted of the realm. Wondered how one might find one's way into acceptance at such an extraordinary place. He found it a curious - and daydream-worthy - thing to ponder.

* * *

**Barnsdale Estate -** He had chosen the roof. Not like the roofs of home, of the Schwarzwald; steeply slanted with their fancily carved eaves and soffits. Roofs no one could easily walk out upon.

He had actually had to hunt down Clun to get the key and gain access out upon it. This roof flat as the ground, gravel of some kind underfoot. The butler and proper key located, once out upon it he had found it a place of mild interest, wide enough in places to take a turn about, with what were probably several impressive views when the sun was up.

He positioned himself facing Southeast, where out upon the waters lay Sark, from whence that island's ridiculous, grasping constable had brought him the ring.

Gisbonnhoffer set both of his hands down upon the roof's broadly crenellated decoration, his elbows locked - planning to rest his weight upon them as he further meditated.

But one of his hands was prevented from locating a bare spot to sit. Something unknown was in the way.

Gisbonnhoffer's curious hands wrapped 'round the cool metal of a spyglass. Quickly he lit a match to inspect its age and condition. It was not old in its make, and was of a very good quality. However, its housing clearly showed that it had been left out - forgotten in the elements (including the salt sea breeze) for months.

His hand squeezed it tighter (mimicking the line his mouth had become). The match fell from his other fingers and extinguished. All such items: spyglasses and binoculars - anything that could be used for long-distance sightings of planes or ships - had been confiscated long ago. They had no place in the hands of Islanders under the occupation. More than several Islanders had been shot for concealing (and/or using) such volatile contraband.

Only those in service to the Reich were to be in possession of such.

Though he could make no better connection than this, he knew that he had found the thing (or at least the first in a collection of things) that he had come here for. Someone in the house had been using this ocular to view the distance, perhaps to count _Luftwaffe_ overhead. Perhaps to track Reich ships moving between islands. It was no great leap to know that such information was valuable only if shared. That such information amounted to a death sentence. Following prolonged torture used to extract the names of contacts and fellow criminals.

"Ellingheim!" he shouted, realizing a level of control and power had returned to his voice. "Ellingheim!"

He began his descent of the stairs into the main house. "Down to the very studs of the walls I want her room - not a scrap of plaster or lath to be left upon them!" He roared.

He felt the briney roughness of the spyglass' metal housing against his palm. It felt of betrayal. "Strip it bare!" he demanded, though it was unlikely his words could be understood as far away as the kitchens. "The floors and ceilings as well!"

It was a strange sense of exhilaration that flooded him. Strange, but not unfamiliar.

**...TBC...**

* * *

_Author's Note:_ If anyone is interested, I opened a forum here at fanfiction to discuss any of the stories in the 'Don't' series. You should be able to find it by searching under forums...TV...RobinHoodBBC...'_Let's Discuss the Don't Series_'. All are welcome.


	44. Squabbles Present & Past FB 1938 Dec

**Nightwatch Windmill - final broadcast before Stoker's rendezvous/departure -** It should have been a much better Nightwatch than the one she had passed with Allen Dale, though that (for all their tendency toward sharpness and borderline irritation with one another) had gone rather smoothly.

She was feeling better where her wound was concerned, and Robin had been Johnny-on-the-spot where his arrival time was concerned. Points all 'round. And that did not even involve the matter they two had before them to discuss.

But it had been impossible to sustain happy chatter and dreams of layettes and christening gowns as they occupied space among supplies so dwindling as to call into question their very right to still be called supplies. Impossible to sustain even for Robin.

"I have found you a way home," he had told her, and his satisfaction with this development was more than obvious in his expression and demeanor.

"Me," she had asked. "Me, a way home?"

"You," he had repeated. "And I speak in the plural." Again that disarming glance of his at her abdomen.

He had then set out to explain the unexpected arrival of one Roger Stoker from home, come to the islands to take some of Robin's unit away with him. Happily, Robin outlined a plausible plan of escape, even making her recite back to him its details several times. Tonight - this night (as the Nightwatch would end in earliest morning) - in early evening to Sark courtesy Allen Dale's launch, then a rendezvous at Hathersage Heath, nearby the standing stones, the cromlech and its ancient dolmen having, hopefully, still enough magic to call forth Stoker's submarine to surface and spirit the lucky, chosen few home.

It was nearly too much for her head to get itself around. A ship home, _escape_. She found it hard to think, to reason as she was at changing records and relating news over-the-air. So rather than fight or argue against (let alone question) anything he proposed, she let him go on building his castles in the air while she - with decided feet of clay - finished her job.

Which had given her husband a good hour in which to be almost fatuously pleased with himself.

"...as long as 'night' has fallen," she concluded, "until oppression ends, the Nightwatch will broadcast freedom to these, our own dear Islands," not waiting much longer than the click 'off' of the transmit button before leaping into her counter-argument.

"If you decline the going," she told him staunchly, shaking her head in disagreement of all his carefully thought-through plans, "then it _must_ be Carter that you send." She saw the predictable tension spring into his jaw. "Even you cannot be blind to the many reasons in evidence that it ought be him who is returned home, that it is a right he has more than earned. That he would be most-valuable to them there, and that his continued presence here endangers us all." She tried to gauge his acceptance of what she was saying. "He is still very much a wanted man. Unlike the rest of your band, his face known-"

Robin had obliged her own eagerness by himself jumping into the fray with both feet, not even allowing her to finish. As a result, some fifteen minutes of hot speech had passed between the two of them, during which she was left with no feeling stronger than that of mild self-satisfaction that she had managed (miraculously) to refrain from throwing anything in his general direction.

"_Carter_," he had roared at one point, "always and ever Carter. Must he always come between us?"

"He is not coming between us," she dissented. "If you will listen you will note I am saying to send him away. Farewell to Carter." She made a little wave. "Goodbye and bon voyage. And _I_ will stay here, with you."

At this, Robin spun on her, coming dangerously close to spilling several of her precious records from where they were tidily stacked onto the stone floor. "Stop! Stop asking me to choose against you - or to argue your way into letting you choose against us - against yourself!" His breath and tone were hot, perspiration due to stress beginning to spring into being along the line of his beard as it descended from above his ear down to his jaw.

She noted this chink - this flaw in his bearing, knowing it showed how intent, how sold upon seeing her away from here he was.

"Since when did _I_ come to represent 'us'?" she asked him, her own voice far from calm, the need to persuade him at this moment perhaps the greatest of her life.

His eyes shot heavenward, as though mystified she could need such an essential, obvious-to-him question answered. "Since you stood on the step above me in the mines and informed me that you now carry 'us' within you, you ridiculous woman!" He wanted to grab for her, as a drowning man grabs at a life ring, a man going over a cliff scrabbles for a root or solid handhold.

"No!" she disagreed. She disliked the way his every argument made a constant and consistent turn toward that development, this child, as though its existence ought alter rational thought. Here she lost her control, her voice raised to a near shriek, as though he had demanded she enact something physically agonizing upon herself. "Stop trying to make me choose myself over you! _Stop it_!" If she had not felt it would appear childish, she would have stamped her foot. But coupled with the coming-on tears threatening at her eyes, she denied herself further display.

In a twinkling, so immediate was his assessment of her, and the turning their argument had taken, Robin's eyes became composed, filled with something she could not name. It was not hurt, nor vengeance. It was not regret, but it was something like a truth, cold and hard and never fully, perhaps, to be in the past where it could no longer hurt them.

"You did it easily enough once before," he reminded her, even as she stood decrying his urging for her to choose herself and what she carried within herself over Carter - over him.

To take the boat and go.

* * *

**London's West End, December 1938 - Mayfair - Edward, Lord Nighten's Georgian town house -** The main floor - the floor appointed so perfectly for social occasions - was literally at the apex of its existence this evening. It deserved nothing less than absolute pages of newsprint devoted solely to the perfection that had been achieved in its dressing and furnishing for this single, flawless night.

Then again, parties given by Lady Nighten were always expected to be just so. And never yet a let down among them.

Clun, the Guernsey butler (who only rarely left the island), had been tasked with escorting a nearly-full boatload of flowers (alstroemerias, freesias - even orchids) from the Barnsdale hothouse across the Channel and on to London, where they were then carefully chosen by their mistress to match _just_ the colors and meet _just_ the remarkable levels of bloom and fragrance to properly compliment her annual Christmas party.

The party, a subject already of some lore and myth, was given every year on the third week-end of December, without regard to numerical date. Invitations were generously delivered, but still - to those among the less endowed levels of society - viewed as scarce and difficult to come by. A marquess might expect an invitation, but so might a struggling playwright with an interesting view of the political scene - as might headmistress of a settlement house who might have the good fortune to see the Nightens as among her patrons, and upon receiving the hand-lettered envelope (always delivered by a Nighten House footman three weeks prior), only to discover she had nothing appropriate to wear.

The now Duke of Windsor had been a frequent guest in the past - with his now brother King and sister-in-law Queen since '36 (as in other things) agreeing to stand as substitute for him in such social matters when their castle schedules permitted.

The lamps were lit high in some rooms, low and muted in others. Dancing was often chief among ways to pass the time, even for the older folk. And so the music (always live) was as important (if not more) than the menu.

Gentlemen of a somber bent usually found their way to the library with its tall bookshelves and leather upholstery, a table for chess - another for backgammon - and ample cigars always available for those professing two left feet while preferring to exercise both their tongues and their ideals.

For the evening, the main stair resembled more of Harrod's - if Harrod's were located within Buckingham Palace - as a seemingly never-ending display of ladies of the ton ascended and descended it on their endless trips to primp and see to their toiletries in one of the next-floor-up lavatories available for such necessities.

"Jacob's Ladder," sighed Mitch Bonchurch from his comfortable place and unobstructed view by one of the entryway's pillars to his best mate, Oxley, who, unlike his fastidious better-half was slouched (although charmingly so) against same pillar, cigarette in his hands to keep them still until the next footman came round passing something else diverting in a glass.

Without much thought he began to devil his friend, "a ladder straight up to Heaven? These girls - ethereal beauties - floating up to claim their reward? Not that Cora Winchester, methinks." Oxley shook his head dramatically, not bothering to hide a pleased-with-himself smile that he knew Bonchurch was not at an angle to properly see.

"Not _Cora_ - " Mitch began, spluttering before he could help himself. Though he had only ever spent small amount of time with her at best, she had always been one of his personal favorites. A nice girl, with bright ginger hair to catch the eye. A fun girl. And now, here was Robin calling that very fun into question. "Why you _couldn't_...you didn't...you..."

The growing purple cast of his mate's face showed him he had let the joke go on a bit too long. Any further and Mitch would have to set out loosening his bowtie.

"Easy now, my Bonny Bonchurch," he attempted to soothe. "It must have been Margo Archambault-Nixon I was thinking of. 'Course it was. Must've been. She's charmingly acrobatic they say," he teased at Lady Margo's expense. "Though one would hardly think it to look at how she chooses to package her figure up as though it were already Boxing Day, and she the charitable foodstuffs."

For a moment both he and Mitch contemplated the young lady in question, wrapped - nay, swaddled almost beyond sight - in layer upon layer upon layer of baby blue organza so that it floated about her like over-milled candy floss, leaving only her head and hands visible, the rest of her a mystery - though not one any man might particularly care to unwrap and discover.

Mitch gave a grunt, as a way of accepting Robin's unspoken apology on the matter of Lord and Lady Winchester's daughter. "And why are _you_ not partnering Marion, anyway?" he queried.

"Last I saw of her, she, too, had ascended the stairs to adjust powder and primp - rising up into your new version of Heaven," he tweaked Mitch. "And now I await her glorious return."

"Well, it is a lovely party," Mitch declared, reaching for a filled flute as a footman's tray passed by them.

"I'm sure," Robin agreed without conviction, watching the bubbly on its journey, but reaching for none of his own. "But yet it is _every_ party. It is the same party we have been attending several times a month since we were permitted down the staircase as lads old enough the adults believed we could behave ourselves without irreparably damaging the family honour."

He inhaled on his fag, two fingers on top, thumb holding it steady from underneath. "The only difference is that Marion is here, and that for the second year in a row I am not too ignorant to know it."

At this undeniable display of oncoming pique, Mitch pressed the flute he had only just taken into Oxley's free hand and stepped away from the pillar as a fleeting shadow of grimace crossed his face. "I do not know why you were born to nark at me so," he told his oldest and best friend. "But I've no patience for it tonight. It is a _lovely_ party, and I intend to find for myself a lovely time." He sniffed. "Therefore, I leave you, entirely, to your fiancee's care."

Robin gave a nod, choosing not to disagree with Bonchurch's assessment of his present bilious state. His eyes had already caught onto the object that might possibly save this party, rescue this very night, for him.

Marion Nighten stood momentarily at the top landing of the Nighten townhouse stair. Her brother Clem was at her side, genteelly escorting her down the steps, though she (and he) both knew she could more than adequately navigate them by the banister alone. (Without dancing shoes on, in fact, in her younger days she had, on more than one occasion when their parents were away - at Clem's dare - successfully ascended the greater part of them entirely upon her hands.)

She looked out over what she could see of the party below not unlike a monarch surveying her dominion. Not unlike, in fact, the way her own mother might similarly appraise her own party from that very spot.

The hem of her gown just flirted with brushing the floor. It was a green so dark it was, in its folds and pleats, black to the eye. Shimmering like colors in a peacock's tail feather. It had a wide neckline that chose to sweep out over her shoulders rather than plunge into decolletage, and sleeves that barely covered the elbow, leading to a peek-a-boo effect with every bend of her arms.

Her hair held a hidden bun at the nape of her neck, concealing its true length, and row upon row of perfectly sculptured waves down either side, as though plotted specially by an architect rather than designed by a beautician. There was none of the height to her coiffure that some of the other ladies were clearly experimenting with that night. The bodice and skirt of her gown were artfully (and daringly to the days' fashion - even if her hairstyle was not) ruched, increasing the opportunity for any viewer to admire the altering color of the fabric under the evening party's variant light.

She wore nothing about her neck - perhaps expecting a present to fill that space before evening's end - but each ear displayed chandelier earrings of white gold that fell well below the lobe, nearly to her bare shoulders, graced by both emeralds and black amber - as if further challenging the eye to puzzle out her frock's true nature.

"You're looking awfully grown-up tonight, Mrs. Tiggywinkle," Clem told her as they began their descent, her upon his arm. He was sure to add the old nickname in order to recall to her mind that no matter what, she was, in fact, still his _little_ sister.

"And you look very handsome," she shot back, using the so-standard-it-had-become-somewhat-ridiculous family line on him.

"The music is good," he replied, not falling for her niggling of him. "Progressive, even, for Mother."

"They're from the Neapolitan Club. Robin recommended them - at her request he do so."

"Come to think of it," he tried again to annoy her. "You don't even smell of horse. Chose not to ride today, did you?"

"If you say one more thing," she threatened, with some relish, "I'll throw my leg over this banister and ride _it_ to the entryway."

He knew her well enough to know that she did not threaten such action hollowly. His eyes narrowed, and his face took on a decidedly uncharacteristic dark cast. "Well, it cannot sink the night any further than it has already been sunk. If not wholly capsized."

Marion caught her breath. "I was hoping I was the only one who had noticed."

"Well, I do not know if it is apparent to others - certainly Father would not mark it. But one knows Mother will. We must be half-a-hundred (if not two-thirds) short in attendance from the numbers she invited."

The last thing Marion wanted to think about was their at-present social decline. It was too close to thinking of her mother. A subject her mind had been unable to avoid for long since Lady Lytton's recent visit, and the startling reveal that her mother was not really at all who her daughter thought she was. That her mother was - as she saw it - a traitor to her own past who had abandoned her personal convictions in order to advance in the life of London Society, over which she now all but solely presided. _No. She did not want to think of her mother tonight_.

"Clem," Marion began, not entirely certain how he would take the question. "Where do _you_ go during a party such as this? When you want to be..._alone_?"

She thought she felt him pause in his stepping down, but it was so brief they soon continued on.

"Alone?" he asked, his eyes scanning the crowd below for the whereabouts of his good friend Oxley. Something grumpy, and borderline disagreeable, entered his tone. "I should think Robin Goodfellow would be a far better person to pose such a question to. He has a singular (and rather notorious) habit of sniffing such places out. Or is it someone else you are wishing to find time 'alone' with? _Hmmm_?"

She let the dig slide. "Yes," she agreed with his assessment of Robin's peculiar skill at keeping such spots for canoodling covert, "but it is not _his_ house."

Several steps passed in silence. "Very well," Clem said, though clearly against his better judgment. "Up the stairs, where the staff stage additional champagne and cocktails should they run out before evening's end. On a night like tonight with the attendance so low, I can hardly think they will need the use of it. Block the servant's door with a few stacked cases of champagne. The hallway door be sure to latch, but other than that I cannot think you will be disturbed."

"But you cannot be sure?" she quizzed him.

"Well, Marion," impatience was added to the growing list of things among his ever-more-evident disapproval, "if you must know, in such instances I have Percival, haven't I? He has always been most helpful to stand guard outside such rooms for me." He shot her a sideways glance. "Do not think I will be asking him to likewise cover for you."

She tried to keep a blush half-embarrassment, half-indignity from blooming on her cheeks, and failed. "Very well," she told him through the blush. "In the interest of giving the dissenting party a platform - do speak on. Is Robin not a good friend of yours?"

"The best, of course," Clem readily agreed. "And I look forward to welcoming him as a brother-in-law in time. Even now, I am overjoyed to see him as you fiance." A cloud seemed to settle upon his brow. "But do not ask me to accept him as the chosen lover of my sister - no matter how grown up she may appear tonight."

"And why not?" she asked, equably. "You have been at playing such games for years. And with several different girls I can readily name."

Clem sighed, knowing that she would not like what came next. He stopped them several steps from the lower landing, just far enough away from the others mingling there to keep their conversation private. "You are twenty and one, Marion. And a young twenty-one at that. And no matter the vast upper echelon of Father's friends you have entranced and charmed - astounded even - with your political and intellectual sophistication (which I doubt can be well matched by many females living at present, much less others of your age) your interactions and conversations with them did not take place in social situations."

"I beg to differ-" she began.

"Very well," he countered, "potentially _intimate_," his voice dropped appreciably, "_sexual_ situations. The men with whom you usually come into contact do not relate with you on a level where they see you as a female they might wish to pursue." He tried to think of how best to articulate what he meant. "You are a novelty to them. Sir Edward's trained bitch pup." He knew that was perhaps a bit too, but he could not take it back now. "'_Isn't she precocious? What an unexpected place to find such wisdom, such conviction!_' You are a Bluestocking, Tigs. No matter the era into which you were born. It is a rare male, indeed, wishing to both chase and bed such an unnatural stick of dynamite."

Well, she had asked for it - for Clem to tell her the truth as he saw it. And of course she respected him for it, giving it without gilding it - just as she would him, when asked. And she knew the opinions he shared with her were not his own. Knew that he loved and thought of her as much more than a trained novelty. Knew that she had his respect, as he had hers. But still, being Marion, she tried to argue.

"And what of Randall Pickering? Of Francis Wetherhugh? Of Geordie Wellington?" she asked, wishing to salvage something of her own dignity.

"Tigs," the infrequent, half-serious smile he only ever wore for her found its way to his lips, "we _both_ know it was Wellington's family who thought it best for him to be seen involved with a girl to quell those nasty rumors threatening to surface about his very private _private_ life." He waited a moment before finishing his rebuttal of her already-made decision. "You have had tutors from exotic places, read books (and retained their contents) enough to replenish Henry VIII's burned-down monasteries. But you have never traveled anywhere without either a parent or a nanny. Not even into the City to spend a short afternoon with friends. The level of social sophistication of women that have not been able to withstand Goodfellow - well, you haven't got it, my darling. I daresay there are women enough working in the Stews that haven't either."

This caused her eyes to harden in their expression. She did not care for his bringing fancy women into their discuss. Nor in his placing them _so_ close to Robin. "You speak of him so, and yet you call him friend?"

He let out a light breath. "It is one thing for another man to enjoy the company and friendship of a notorious Lothario, Marion. It is quite another for you - _you_ - to think you might engage yourself willingly in certain activities with him and expect to be able to control or manage their outcome." And here was his summation. "I think it is a bad, ill-conceived idea for you to take such a step. For at night's end I feel certain you will not find yourself long at the top of the stair," he cast his eyes upward for effect, "but rather, quickly having descended to its bottom."

Again, his half-serious smile that evoked both that he meant what he said, and that also, he knew she sympathized with his argument, and in his own sympathy wished he could reason otherwise.

She took a breath, it always being better to have plenty of air when announcing you are about to defy someone's plan of action for you. "Then I suggest you will find yourself most surprised this evening, Brother," she said cryptically, "for I plan to shock you on more than one account."

He let her declaration stand. "Marion," he said, knowing he had well lost long before he had begun, "be sure you know what you're doing." He would attempt to persuade her otherwise no further.

A contrary - even blithe - reply came to her mind, and she did not censor herself from sharing it. "I'm sure if I don't, Robin Goodfellow will."

* * *

**Nightwatch Windmill - present time -** "After all I have seen...have myself done - _know_ I will myself yet do - Can you not know how precious this is to me?" Robin begged her to see, "A reason for hope - for anticipation. For things I never thought to know again. To think that perhaps the world is yet, still, a place for a child. That somehow, in all of this the human spirit yet wishes, longs, to endure?" He shook his head to clear the tears coming-on in his own eyes.

"I am a dead man, Marion - twice-killed. First my heart, then my body. Certified deceased, no longer capable of life, by our very Government. Finding you again proved to me the world was still capable of magic, of ways we none-too-well understand. _I_ was the unicorn on Sark, Marion. Alone, without a mate, without any responsibility other than where I chose to find it. I will willingly go back to that now. In order to safeguard you - both."

"The 'human spirit'?" she scoffed at him. "Is it not that very 'human spirit' we live under now? That very desire to control and kill in order to have power over another? After all I've seen...after all I've done - and nearly done - Can you not know how terrified - how frightened beyond expressing it - I am? No matter that I know all but nothing about babies. No matter that I would likely have to go into an even deeper hiding here to wait out the next months. Say what you will, but there is no room in our world for children," her voice shook, and not only from the conviction with which she spoke. "The Germans have seen to that. Islander children with eyes already old as a grandfathers'. Their bodies gaunt and undersize, malnourished. Will we watch this happen to _our_ child? A casualty of the human spirit? Still, nothing it is whispered, as to what the Germans do to the Jews in their Fatherland, and other Occupied lands. Children, too." Something told her she had lost her point, veered off, unintentionally, into strengthening his own.

"The only thing that doesn't terrify me," she began again, "is that it is _your_ baby. And again, it is you - only you - that makes me believe in it at all. And yet here you scheme to rob me of that very foundation, that support post, by sending me - and my growing night terror - away. How can you do this to me? _And_ ask me to agree to it?"

He waited no longer, all fight within her dissipating. He took her into his embrace.

"This is something you tell me _I_ must live for," she told his shoulder, "and yet I am to allow - to permit - you to see it, instead, as something to _die_ for? Do not feed me such rubbish and call it 'high ideals'." Even as she railed against him, she sought comfort in his proximity. "You are asking me to choose against my own happiness. Against my own sanity."

"No," he told her softly. "I'm asking you to choose for a future - and a future happiness - and in doing so to safeguard mine."

"What," she began to pull away, but his arms forbade it. "Your _legacy_?"

"No," he replied. "Well, perhaps yes. My _raison_."

She sniffed hard to keep her nose under control, let her arms slip about him. "So you have found that, finally, after all this time? A reason to live - a passion, a purpose?"

His smile added further creases to the crescent-moon wrinkles that clustered about his eyes. "Taking nothing away from our present discussion, but I found it upon my second death, really. I found what I could be to the lads. That I could effect change. That my existence might yet matter, might yet amount to something. That I could make choices, lead men, win a skirmish, steal a codebook. That at times I could even inspire another person to decide something for the better of all. And here, on your Islands, that as a unit we could make a difference, though small in the scheme of the war, not small to those we could help - those that no one was looking out to help. The abandoned, the hungry and needlessly impoverished. Those the King and his Parliament were sworn to protect and oversee, but whom had been abandoned to the Reich, abused by Prinzer. And the poor souls imprisoned upon Alderney for whom I still hope to do some good."

She nodded her head, rubbing against his cheek and neck. "So you found yourself, in a war."

"Yes," he agreed, stroking rhythmically at her back with the heels of his hands. "I found myself in a war I was little-schooled on, and even less interested in, but once _in_ it? I found who I could be, and more importantly, who I _wanted_ to be."

* * *

**London's West End, December 1938 - Mayfair - Edward, Lord Nighten's Georgian town house -** "Do something with your life!" she had shouted at Robin, nearly adding, '_as I mean to do!_' But of course she was getting ahead of herself in the memory. What had happened first had been far more cheeky, far more what one might expect at such a party than the first shot fired in a blistering, life-altering row.

It had been easy enough to get him to follow her to the room in question. Once arrived, he had been predictably charmed by its unusual contents.

"We might as well attempt a bathe in bubbly," he told her, his usual cheek dependable as ever. He noted there was already a large metal basin near the davenport packed with additional liquor that waited only to be removed in order to serve this decadent new purpose his mind had proposed.

He threw himself upon said davenport, smoking with a somewhat greater gusto, its high upholstered back for a moment concealing the fact from him that she was at carefully stacking several crates of champagne against the servant's door to ensure their privacy.

Knowing her better than to think she might take him up on his offer to swim and splash among the party's excess champagne, he addressed the ceiling as he spoke to her, his enthusiasm growing exponentially as he spoke on. "So I was thinking, my lady," he began. "I have heard you complain and moan and seen your eyes roll back into your head so often these past weeks as to cause me to fear I might never see them again properly within their orbits. What if...we managed to remove such travails from your life as endless chats with the stationer, lengthy fittings with the dressmaker - incessant worryings over seating plans and table linen? What if we just took control and eliminated such time-consuming impediments to your life? Going back to a life before this engagement? Before planning began to eclipse the 'loving' that unsuspectingly brought it all on?"

During his speech she had returned to stand next to where he still lay prone upon the davenport. "Whatever are you suggesting?" she asked him for clarification, her mind otherwise occupied, and having no understanding of what he could possibly mean.

Momentarily he looked for a place to ash his fag. Finding none he hastily (and indecorously) flicked it into the un-touched flute he had carried into the room. The champagne within it hissed and bubbled as it accepted the new visitor, which slowly floated to its delicate, curved crystal bottom. Robin slid from where he now sat on the sofa onto a single knee.

Incorrectly assuming him somewhat pickled and unable to stand, Marion lowered herself into a seat upon the sofa and tried to see into his eyes.

"Marry me now," he told her. "Sod the planning." He did not usually use such language in front of her, but then again, since their engagement became public they were not very often alone. "Sod the rest, the guests, the presents, the _pomp_. Let us take from all this the part which makes us happy, which is each other. Throw the rest overboard to lighten our journey."

"To-tonight?" she asked, her voice shaky, his request so unexpected - so contrary to what she had to tell him before party's end.

A level of reason returned to his tone. "Well, perhaps not tonight, but tomorrow - or before week's end. The good vicar at Kirk Leaves will gladly assist us, if your chap at Lincoln Greene objects. We have been publicly engaged, all the necessary announcements made for well over a year. You cannot - nor can they - accuse me of attempting to Rochester you to the altar before you discover my mad wife in the attic." His eyes were lit as though from behind, sparking to something inside of him that even she did not often witness. "Kiss me and say yes," he told her. In the absence of her having offered him her hand, the pair of his rested half upon the sofa upholstery, half upon her knees.

"I. I," she had not planned to struggle to get the words out. She forced herself to lean in toward his ear to finish her practiced declaration, which allowed her to render it in a much lower and softer tone. "I'm not wearing any knickers," she said, realizing as she felt one of his hands flex involuntarily near her knee that she hadn't really practiced a follow-up.

**...TBC...**


	45. Continued FB 1938 & an accord is reached

**London's West End, December 1938 - Mayfair - Edward, Lord Nighten's Georgian town house -** A look of puzzled wonderment played upon Robin's face, but only for a moment. "Well," he asked, "where has this saucy lass been these long months of our courtship, I ask you?" his eyes cannily taking in the room's out-of-the-way surroundings as if for the first time.

"Don't worry about that," Marion attempted to assure him. "She's here now."

She reached for one of his hands, but losing her courage at the last minute, settled it benignly over her now-galloping heart, rather than upon the outer curve of her breast, which had been her original intention.

"Free of all other underpinnings as well," she added, by way of encouragement. She tried to think of the slender sheer quality of her frock's fabric, of how little lay between him and her.

But she was finding it very hard to meet his gaze. Not because she in any way feared what was to come next, what she had set herself upon a pathway toward. Rather, because within his once lit-and-animated eyes she could see (even when she wasn't looking) that there was a determination growing, a sense in him that he had just been presented with a puzzle to solve, a paradox to unmuddle. That though his hand may tremble without his direct consent, his mind was not truly yet led along, distracted and entranced as she needed it to be.

She leaned into him, at least partly to continue to avoid his eyes until they would settle into unsuspicious acceptance of what was about to take place. In doing so, her hand still upon his wrist, his hand naturally slid away from her heart and to the side in order to accommodate her sudden closeness.

She kissed him, feeling the peculiar sensation of her undressed thighs, her own skin upon her own skin, somehow signaling decadence to her.

His hand (she could not tell if it still needed her hand upon its wrist to hold it there) nearly floated across the soft, pliable ruchs falling from the neckline in the upper bodice of her frock, both touching and yet not touching her.

There was a brief flare in the fervor of his kissing her back, and sensing it she seized the moment to secure Robin's continued participation.

She took his other hand and moved it further up her leg - her thigh - along the equally sleek, frictionless skirt of her frock until his fingers were necessarily halted by encountering her torso and hip, his thumb having dipped in its journey toward her inner thigh.

Still she kissed him, hoping to kiss away the look nevertheless lingering in his eyes (no matter that they closed every now and again). Hoping that he would not make her attempt every action necessary to consummate the night without at some point also fully joining in.

He broke away from the kiss, and she felt his hands withdraw from where she had placed them. She expected those spots to turn quickly cold. Instead, they continued to give off an unexpected heat.

From his position still on a single knee, he smoothly lifted the long hem of her gown, enough to get his hand underneath it, and began to run it up the back of her (as promised) bare leg. He stopped for a moment and caressed her calf, brought his hand back down so that he might cup her ankle. As she felt his fingers arrive at the lower back of her knee, she realized (with far more understanding and finality than she had before) that there was now, truly nothing - not even so much as fabric - between he and her. Not even the nothing-to-navigate garter belt that she had removed and cast off into a trunk in her bath, worried lest even her maid see it and she be compelled to produce a reason why she did not have it on.

The length of her skirt draped over her legs, over his arms and hands within it, hiding them from view, only as it arched, the tip of her foot and toes occasionally coming into focus from underneath it.

The thought of such freedom, such unencumberedness, coupled with his elevating her leg to the height of his shoulder and kissing at its ankle brought a sound from within her she had not quite expected.

"Stop," Robin said, and she was surprised to hear a command within the sharpness of it.

_What could it mean? Was this how he liked to experience such moments? It did not seem like him._

"Stop, I say," and the sharpness remained as he unceremoniously let her leg fall to the carpet, heel first.

"What can you mean?"

She managed, finally, to find her speaking voice. "How can you want that?" She was now a knot of incompletion on both physical and intellectual fronts.

The teeth of his lower jaw began to push against his lower lip. A sign she had long ago deciphered as frustration. "Because I am beginning to feel decidedly manipulated," he told her as he rose, his eyes suspiciously sliding to the side to contemplate her. "...rather than merely seduced."

"Merely seduced?" She remained sitting, her hands now within her lap, but allowed her tone to rise and meet his. "I finally throw myself at you - what you've always been at asking for - what it seems you've always wanted - and you find it 'merely' seductive?" She scoffed. "That is _quite_ enough insult for one night." She cocked her head, waiting for him to withdrawal his accusation.

He did not.

Were Marion anyone else, he would have put one hand to the high-back davenport and leaned in as he spoke, more than slightly threateningly, but something about her - about their exchange - left his back stiff, unwilling to accommodate any inclination that might be interpreted as 'bowing' to her will - even if merely physically. "And may _I_, then, find it insulting that, rather than your replying promptly to my offer of immediate marriage, you choose instead - with no impetus, nor invitation by myself - to _hide_, yes, I think hide - what I can only assume will be your refusal by attempting to distract me with sex?" His eyes searched hers wildly, intent on truth - and explanation.

She could not believe what she was hearing. All her planning, all her hopes. Her hopes to show him she _did_ care for him, to persuade him that she would marry him - in time. Her plan to convince him beyond shadow-of-a-doubt that what she had to tell him this night would alter their arrangement not at all. That she would give him this thing. No, that they would _share_ this thing, make this memory, strengthen this bond. This, that would carry him through. That, (she did not particularly care to think of it this way) would placate him, until the wedding. Her own ire flared. "How _dare_ you insinuate that this - THIS - would not be something meaningful for me. That it is not with great consideration and, and _emotion_ that I have decided upon this."

Robin moved aside, putting the long, low table, the lone flute of champagne he had brought with him, between him and her. His body was as tense as though he had endured a spell of being tied on the rack. His hands were beyond even the calming power of juggling either lone cigarette or engraved silver case.

"Well, see, my love," he told her, though the tenderness conveyed by the intonation of 'my love' was somewhat dubious at the moment, "that is where your scheme has fallen short. After two years of saying, very firmly (and even, very fairly) 'no', it makes little sense to change your mind so utterly one Christmas night when I have not even been at play-chasing you." He paused as though she might wish to speak.

She did not.

"_I_ did not work you up into such a state of arousal. Rather, I honorably offered to marry you within the week - if not sooner - at which time your long-held goal of, as I recall, '_not lying down until I never have to get up again_' could be accomplished. And at which time we might have aroused one another, quite legally, 'til our dying days. Here," he indicated the room they occupied, "you attempt to befuddle my mind, hoping, I can only assume (and it is not a very pretty assumption) that I will not notice your failure to reply to my matrimonial suggestion."

With his speech, some of the tension had leeched out of him. But not all.

"Very well," Marion said, now rather cold all over, save the top of her head which threatened to reach the boiling point at his outraged lecture aimed at her. "I cannot marry you straightaway. There is no time." Out of the corner of her eye she caught an unwelcome glimpse of a small portrait sitting upon the mantel, of her mother as a young woman.

"But I have just said," Robin reiterated. "We shall cast off all such chaff as planning and balls, soirees and teas. The Earl's tenants do it every day, and I am assured it is quite official."

_Would he not stop speaking of hurrying along their wedding? Would he not stop queering her pitch (however ignorantly), making it ten-to-the-twentieth times harder to say what she had resolved to say this night?_ She made her first attempt.

This was meant to have followed a very passionate, sincere, and satisfying bout of lovemaking. If possible, while still lying in one another's arms. As was, there was no way to cushion the blow, and the news she had meant to relate cheerily, with a by-the-by breeziness, (news over which she had hoped - thought - they possibly might even further celebrate) abruptly turned sour on her, naked and unpleasant as the wizened Emperor in his 'new clothes'. "No, I," having lost her preferred method of delivery, she dropped her head, unable to meet his gaze. She set to picking at a thread on the mustard upholstery of the seat. "There is no time. I am to..." she lifted her chin, resolving to be ashamed no longer, but rather than seeing him she could only meet the unblinking eyes of the young woman, her mother, in the mantel's small portrait. "I am committed to doing something that will make me more at home in my marriage."

She did not have to look at him to know that his face fell.

"I am leaving at the year's start for the American Equestrian Circuit."

If the certain frequency of high notes (as sung by an opera singer) shattered glass, the silence that followed her confession/announcement must have knit the glass in the bottles that surrounded them more tightly than any forge fire, bonded the crystal in the stemware to a strength beyond breakability. While enacting the opposite upon them. Marion and Robin: coming apart.

"With the horse," he added flatly to her declaration, his voice that of air deflating from a zeppelin, his eyes closing in comprehension of the past three-quarters of an hour.

"Yes," she tried to inject her response with excitement and anticipation, this trip something to look forward to - to be proud of, "with Beau. It is a chance - a chance for both of us," she continued passionately, indicating the horse, "to experience something. You, you cannot understand." She looked at him, dressed as sharply as any dandy, yet never exuding such sycophantish idiocy. She began to speak without censoring herself, never having planned to lay the many jealousies, the many irritations and fears she had of him at his doorstep - much less to do so tonight. "You have been to school, earned your place at university. You have the option every day to occupy a desk at a respected soliciting firm in the City (an option which you rarely exercise, save between two and four of the clock on the odd day of the month when you are not suffering a hangover). You vacation on the Continent, travel without the Earl how and when it pleases you. You have access to learning," here her voice threatened to break. "To people of note and significance. You have the _world_, Robin - you need but only ask and if you cannot go to it, it will be brought to you." She wondered if the tears assembling in her eyes spoke to him more of outrage or sadness. "Even my own post is first shuffled and screened through my mother or her maid before being handed to me. That they may know who is writing, even if they have not stooped to breaking the seals on such letters in several years."

He could not be unmoved by the zeal with which she spoke, letting that emotion cover over her less-than-ringing endorsement of him and his ways. "Yes, then, we shall go together," to him it solved everything. His voice quickened to match her earlier enthusiasm. "We can marry now and easily have our trunks ready for shipping - or go and buy what we best need when we arrive." He was about to smile.

"I have said," she interrupted that smile, sticking to her key points, refusing to be distracted from them. "There is no time for a wedding. There will be time when I return."

He cocked his head at this. Again at further sussing what she was up to - this grand idea (and any preparation it required) hardly springing into existence overnight, much less the execution of it. And yet he, the fiance, unaware of it - even as a distant pipe dream, much less as a coming-on fact. "I had no idea you so enjoyed such planning," he said, sarcasm growing behind his words. His eyes narrowed. "You never cared for society before."

"Society," she huffed with disgust. "As a wife," she willed herself not to look again to her mother's portrait, "what else might ever be my domain?"

He studied her for a moment, assuring himself she knew what she was saying - what she had implied before throwing it back in her face. "And is my heart, then, not enough?" he asked, his words staccato with emphasis, his eyes ablaze.

How could she do this to him? Say such a thing. The other things: his perceived sloth, his uselessness to the greater scheme of the world, his free-wheeling, spendthrift ways, his inability to stop before exceeding the line drawn at excess with drink and dame - the ridiculousness of his person. These he was more than acquainted with from any discussion with his father, from (at times) Mitch, and any number of headmasters and even other women he had taken out.

But to hear Marion, the woman who had changed his world (if not his habits), _Marion_ say that his heart was not enough for her...that she must also pursue some personal goal - some personal glory - in a distant place, without him. Well, in that moment he knew for the first time that he must be truly worthless. Must be what people said of him and worse.

He was surprised Mephistopheles himself did not rise from under the very carpets of Nighten house and carry him down to Hades.

Marion, the only thing he had wanted in a decade, the only thing to which he had allowed himself to aspire, declaring him not enough, his heart lacking - when his heart was all he had ever had of his own to give anyone. When he was entirely committed to using it to its very utmost for her. When she had made him so happy, simply by existing. Made him invest himself into the next day, when he might see her again. Gave him a reason to wake, to think of a future.

Crumbling, now, the bricks of his foundation compromised and he had never noticed. She loved him not. _Not enough_. Not as he did her.

His demeanor fell, his voice grasping for explanation. "Is this what you planned to tell me as we embraced in the afterglow of your carnal designs upon my person tonight? That you are leaving me. That my heart is not enough domain for you to rule over? That you would far rather plan a wedding than begin to live a new life together?" He looked at her where she was seated nearly with hate. With a disgust borne of a man who has put his whole self upon the table only to see it rejected, and the embarrassment and hurt of such tempers his original tender feelings into something harder, uglier, and even violent. "It is small wonder you thought to dose me first with a spoonful of sugar."

She opened her mouth, but found she could not yet speak, the change in him so jarring to her.

"God, Marion," he chid her. "Do you know how much I would have hated you for it?"

"No!" she decried what she saw happening in front of her eyes, even without understanding it. "I love you Robin, I truly do." _Could he not see?_ "More than anything!"

Spite was on his tongue. "And yet you find yourself needing a plan to do something to 'make you more at home in your marriage'?" He scoffed hard. "_To me_? Perhaps it is best you go, Marion. I do not doubt I shall be far from proper company in the upcoming New Year," he hinted, threatening a likely return to his prior dissolute lifestyle of excess and ennui.

Feeling that she had lost entirely her grasp on their conversation, reacting as one gasping for air might, she went with the first thing that came to her mind: outrage that he would blame any backsliding in his life upon her, upon her perfectly rational decision to take this trip. "How can you not do something with your life!" she shouted, thinking, for not the first time, of his obvious prospects where a seat in government was concerned. She felt so envious of him, of his opportunities, those already wasted, and those potentially yet to waste in future. Her head hurt from the force of it.

As he stormed out of the room to locate his hostess (her mother) from the party beyond and beg her pardon for departing early, Marion's final thoughts - through her searing headache - careered around the fact she had not had a chance to tell him - to discuss with anyone - how grave things seemed to be becoming between her parents in the wake of her father's monograph being published. That despite several politicians throughout Europe championing the ideals and clarion call it had set forth, the reception (particularly among her mother's Society here in London) was far cooler. To the point that Lady Nighten feared nothing short of shunning in her future. The low attendance at tonight's party certainly suggested it.

But Sir Edward stood firm, staunchly refusing to renege on what he so fully believed in. Their arguing the point could at times now be heard throughout the house (a sound _never_ heard prior), and Marion had more than once caught two servants in deep discussion bandying about the word 'divorce', their voices silenced only by making her presence known.

The public face and interaction of her parents (even at the family breakfast table), once so pleasant, could now be described as 'frigid' at best.

She could hardly bear to share a room with both of them. She had begun to retreat further and further into her night owl routine, starting later and retiring later, to the point she rarely saw her family, save occasional conversations with her father alone. They two had been so hopeful for the reception of his monograph - containing not a word both did not wholeheartedly embrace and agree with. They had spoken of its being the first crack in dismantling what Germany was trying to build. They had no idea it would signal, rather, the seemingly imminent collapse of their own family.

_How could she have explained to Robin that his heart - she thought his heart - was enough, but there was an 'and yet' attached to that statement?_

She had been nothing short of horrified to hear her own lips question (though the notion must have been flitting about in her nightmares for some time) that once married, 'what would her life be about other than Society?' It sounded so terrible. A death knell of a type. It sounded so of something she might expect her mother to believe - if not to say.

Her mother, once a brave crusader for right, a respected political mind - who gave it up, turned her back on right and challenging the wrong. Who let a setback - several setbacks - steer her course away from risk, from her own convictions. Who came to settle for presiding over some of the silliest women in London. Society: her only dominion. A woman's bailiwick, its borders entirely domestic, appointed chatelaine to nothing beyond that to which her husband endowed her.

A woman who now risked (perhaps even looked forward to) losing her own husband, the man who loved her best, over a monograph whose set-forth ideals she fully believed. But that she could not acknowledge publicly lest she lose her ever-shaky hold upon her variable kingdom and its shallow-headed (and hearted) minions.

Lady Nighten's position was all she had. And she seemed now set to sacrifice both her own ethics, and her marriage to it.

Marion's mind returned to Robin. The taste in her mouth remained bad to her still, minutes creeping on from when he had walked out of the room, from when she had voiced her 'and yet'.

Knowing she was not likely able to uncork one of the room's many bottles of champagne on her own (certainly she had never done so before), and wishing to see no one else, she grabbed for the still-filled flute Robin had brought in with him, grabbing it off the low table in front of her. Steeling herself for the action, she drank, stopping short only from swallowing the butt-end of the fag he had cast off within it.

_Ashes_.

_Yes_, she thought, feeling here and there within her mouth the flecks of grit among the familiar bubbles. _That seemed about right_.

* * *

**Nightwatch Windmill - present time -** "I will have nowhere to go," Marion told him in further protest. "An unmarried woman without a father she might name for her coming child?" She shook her head, "I cannot ruin the Nighten family with this news, surely."

Robin attempted a blithe response. "Although I daresay the Earl was gently relieved when I perished quite admirably in His Majesty's service, rather than was found, indecorously passed away in the back of my Roadster from too much drink, go to him, Marion. Stoke swears he has been at taking in and boarding refugees at Kirk Leaves. And is being assisted by Mitch's mum, Lady Sophie. Her heart has always been soft where the Earl's has been somewhat inanimate in the past." He gave her arms a squeeze, trying not to dwell on the fact this might be one of the final plans they two would be able to make for many months. If ever again. "The estate is far enough from London to avoid most gossip. We can have Stoke and his lads dream you up a temporary new name, if you like." His brow furrowed. "Take some time, should you need it, before reconciling with your family."

Marion leaped to counter his diminishing the Earl's feeling for him. "Oh, you are so very wrong, my love, my dearest love," she told him, dragging her fingers through his hair to where they hugged at the back of his neck. "The Earl would fall on you and kiss you as the Prodigal Son's father were he to see you alive. And slaughter a baker's dozen of fatted calves." She traced his browline with one of her thumbs. "He has always had such a heart for you - even when you could not see it, and his enduring grief kept him from expressing it."

"But not your mother?" Robin asked, trying to lead her into confessing that her own family still greatly cared for her. "Nor Clem, you think?"

She pursed her lips. "You said your Stoker knew of my engagement to Geis?"

"Yes," he nodded. "He said that's what the gossip was at MI-6. Don't know if it's gone much further than that."

Marion exhaled. It was as she had always suspected: her present (unavoidable) choices forever altering her future world. "Well, so at least Clem - if not mother - thinks I am engaged to a Jerry (if not already wed)." She shrugged, finding comfort in the weight of his hands upon her arms, the encompass of his embrace. "What have I to offer them as proof otherwise? The Nightwatch is unknown at home, I've no doubt - and no doubt SIS will wish to keep it that way. So here I am, single refugee daughter, arriving home after nearly five years without her respected father to defend her character or her choices, unable to explain myself or name the father of _my_ child. Whom all involved will assume...as would you or I...is said Jerry."

That part, at least, would be different on the islands, so very many, if not nearly all of the children born to Islander women during the Occupation the uncontested offspring of German soldiers. So common anymore women no longer even sought to conceal it.

"Go to the Earl," Robin said again, attempting to sound confident. "I shall write a letter for you to take. Date it around the time of my enlistment, saying that I have given it to you in case you should need help of any kind - no matter your situation - that you should seek indefinite sanctuary with the Earl. That he ought consider you as much my wife as were the banns read and fulfilled. And that he ought also, should you need, settle any monies upon you - and any child you might have - that he may have once considered mine." He raised his eyebrows as if to ask her assent to this new wrinkle in their plan, but did not wait for her response. "No matter your protestations I have never considered him a sentimental man, but he _is_ honourable and would take such a vow of mine with all seriousness."

She found her mind wishing to skip ahead of his outlay of the immediate future. If Stoker's sub did come this night - less than seventeen hours from now - she could see England, see Kirk Leaves, even, in less than 72. It was dizzying to contemplate. "And you will come to me there?"

He nodded his head and then placed the side of his temple against hers. "When my work here is done, I shall fly to you both, rather - all three of you - " he included the Earl, "without so much as allowing myself to be debriefed, to say nothing of changing my clothes or accepting refreshments of any kind."

She smiled at this vow, though not without sadness pulling about the corners of her eyes. "It will be hard not to tell the Earl to keep your rooms at the ready."

"No, Wife," he disputed, placing a kiss near her ear. "Make my bed one of straw - in the stall where your Beau was birthed. I find I am destined for the farm life wherever I go. And our child shall no doubt learn to walk, dodging horse manure among your many four-footed friends."

She pushed aside his equine reference. At the back of her mind lay the question she knew would nag at her in the coming hours: the question of whether she were not making the same choice her mother had those years ago, in the wake of the Epsom Derby and the death of Emily Davison. (The choice for which she had always held her in such low regard.) Choosing a child - a family - over her calling, over her war yet to be waged. Would it not be possible to have both? Or had the Jerries here, in this instance, made it impossible to pursue each in tandem?

"Robin," she asked him aloud, saving the question of her mother for her own, single-sided musings later, "if not for me, would you go? Or rather, if you were in my position - truly, no using this merely as your bully pulpit - would you go? Would you leave things here, abandon the islands, and their people?"

He let the air hang silent as he agreed to genuinely consider his answer.

"There is something one is taught in training," he began, "even if one already knows how to sense such a time. And that is the notion of when it is time to pull out, to retreat. Even if I mightn't always be able to see it for myself, I have always been keenly aware of it where my men - my mates - are concerned. Were I, like you," he brushed part of her hair to the side, "the object of such intense interest to a Jerry officer - his potential target at every possible turning - to discover that I was with child, yes, I would get out. My choices - my comfort level with risk - would no longer be solely my own. I would be living on a clock counting down, a potato masher once the pin was pulled. It is only a matter of time before the defences we have laid in place fall, and you will find it too late for retreat, and yourself too depleted for attack."

She listened to what he said, heard that he spoke of Geis rationally, with none of his usual vitriol. His argument could not be more sound, more compelling. She was to be only a retreating soldier, then - not a failure, not a coward or deserter. She was to live to fight another day. These terms she thought she could accept.

"Very well, I will go," she told him, agreeing at last. She would have him instruct Allen to enlist the psychic, Joss Tyr, to repeat his impersonation of the Nightwatch nightly, taking over her present duties.

She did not tell Robin what a weeping cavern he had already opened up within her as he spoke of their parted future, referencing his own arrival in England as not only _after_ his child was born, but after it had also learnt to walk.

It was an impossible agreement she had made with him. Perhaps every bit as impossible as the alternative.

For the next moments she worked to clear her mind of it as she let him lower her (with himself) to the windmill's floor, where he'd tossed down a quilt behind several blocking barrels, concealing them from any uninvited guests.

His handling of her - of the still gunshot-wounded her - was gentle to a fault. She kissed him, and brought her hands to all parts of him knowing she was soon to say goodbye to such important luxuries, but also clinging to the fact that they were to meet tomorrow on Sark, well before Stoker's night rendezvous, to enact whatever there might be of the more final goodbye to which she had just reluctantly agreed.

**...TBC...**


	46. Men lost unknown outraged n unconscious

**GUERNSEY - path to Heindl Cottage - Day of Roger Stoker's planned rendezvous/departure -** Marion Nighten, at-present resident of the Island of Guernsey, had changed her plans. Originally she had thought to spend the better part of her day at the Nightwatch Windmill, bidding it farewell, readying it for its new tenant, perhaps leaving some notes on song selections or listing out technical issues she had at times come up against.

It proved a less than cheery task, especially amidst the many reminders of her self-declared mission as the Nightwatch here; the portentous echoes of her own imminent leaving, her mother's not dissimilar (though reviled by her daughter) stepping down from her own cause for like reasons. Every direction Marion's thoughts agreed to turn incited tension in her stomach and distress in her mind.

But it was such a fine day - the skies clear, the sea bright - for some reason, once exhausted from far-deeper subjects and wrestlings, they repeatedly turned toward Eva and the Heindls.

At first she wondered if she might be able to pay them a 'farewell' visit without giving away that she was, in fact, at doing just that.

_Farewell_. Her mind drifted back to the early morning, the large part of an hour extravagantly spent (for two freedom fighters) in one another's arms. He had still been asleep, his breath even, its pace intimately familiar to her now, when she took the ring that signified her wedding - their bond - from her own left finger and worked at enlarging its incomplete circumference so that it might now fit to his.

She found she was as loathe to part with it as nearly as she was to part with him. It was not much of a ring to begin with - far more of an improvised cuff - but she had worn it without removing it since their simple ceremony.

It had seemed right to her that Robin must safeguard it now, that it was something she could leave with him, her now carrying a much larger (or at least soon-to-grow-much-larger) memento of him within herself.

It was her battle to install it on his own left ring finger that recalled him to consciousness, though at first incompletely so.

"I hadn't meant to waken you," she apologized, her voice low and soft as though she might cozen him back into sleep.

"Am I to be a jewel thief now, as well?" he asked, though the simple band had no such jewels of which to boast. Even though he teased, he accepted it from her, his own fingers working to size it just right to grip the base of his pinkie, as it was clear to him even in his drowsy state it was never to agree to encircling any other of his digits. Much less his broken one.

Even on his smallest finger, it was not lost on her: the gap necessary for him to wear it had sizably widened from when her own finger had borne it.

"The distance now is greater," she told him, without explaining, oncoming sadness clogging her throat.

"Hush now, Wife," he told her, his own voice matching her quiet tones. "When I come to fetch you we'll have it closed up properly. Mended with the finest silver in all London. The present gap will be little more than a memory."

She had grabbed for his hand back, and kissed it and the ring as reverently as one might the Archbishop of Canterbury's.

There had been no returning to sleep after that.

* * *

She looked to her left hand now, unusually bare, its skin still divoted in the outline of the ring. _More than one way for a person to be marked_, she thought.

* * *

Before departing for the Heindl's she did burrow about a bit at the Nightwatch Windmill to locate and secure the second-to-last smallish barrel of pickles to present them as a gift. As she cradled it, sloshing about within her arms, she allowed herself some space to ponder babies. It had been Hilda, Eva's mother (according to family lore) who had first notified Lady Nighten that her long summer holiday on the island with her husband was to result in a future happy event. That happy event some six months after Hilda's prediction resulting in the birth (now at Lincoln Greene) of Marion herself.

At this remembrance, Marion's intent toward the Heindls quickly switched from that of a mere social call to one of medical import. If anyone could confirm her suspected condition, she quickly convinced herself, it would be the inexplicably prescient Hilda.

Entirely oblivious to the fact that the more conventional ways to approach the Heindl cottage were now being policed by German guards, Marion used the old dodge, approaching by the rear through the scraggly woods. It had always been the pathway friends and neighbors trod for paying calls, but this day she found herself more often than not relying solely upon memory, as it was remarkably overgrown and had obviously gone unused for sometime. In fact, it had always been the quickest route between Barnsdale and the Heindl's. It was clear it had been long weeks (if not months) since Eva had made her way via this footpath to visit the estate.

But of course it would now be Robin's man Allen Dale, driving for the Kommandant, that would be tasked with chauffeuring Eva to and from her Jerry lover. No simple task, that. The little-known mud track that left the main road to end at the Heindl's home was by most standards impassable by auto.

Marion was contemplating this complication when she happened upon a day-laborer at his work in one of the Heindl's few fields. It was easy enough to contain her surprise (though the Heindls had never been well-suited to afford hired-in help before). She saw nothing out-of-the-ordinary about the chap from the rear - certainly nothing particularly recognizable. She did not think Daniel could have grown so very much since last she saw him.

But there was something...irregular about the man's posture. Not in the way of a man working through an injury, really, but a general lack of stooping in the shoulders, as was like to overcome even the burliest and most robust of farmhands over time (and this man was hardly describable as burly). There was something rather noble in his bearing, as a young girl of a romantic bent reading Hardy might foolishly imagine Gabriel Oak to posses in his posture. Hardly the level of comportment, though, one expected to encounter in a peasant at working a field.

In her walking toward the laborer she must have made a sound to disturb him, as he turned to see who was there.

In that moment Marion froze, unable to tell if her disbelieving eyes - or his own gob-smacked countenance - would have better registered the shock of surprise both felt.

She did not notice dropping the pickle barrel, nor its breaking apart. Nor did she avert her eyes to watch the pickles' now-uncontained juices running across her feet and into her shoes before disappearing into the soft ground.

"My Lady Marion," Mitch Bonchurch choked out, his own feet refusing for the moment to move him nearer her.

"Alive," was all the sensible speech her tongue granted her, and that a half-gasp.

"But I - I am in France," he stuttered out, his voice an undertone. It offered little explanation.

"No," she disagreed, her voice matching his in its low volume.

"Marion! _Cherie_! _Bonjour_!"

They both heard Eva call, flying toward them from the direction of the nearby cottage, her arrival to Marion signifying the presence of Barnsdale's former ladies maid, her best friend on the islands - the Alderney Kommandant's favorite bit of girl. To Mitch, the person he most longed to protect in the world, his landlady - the woman he loved.

* * *

**On the water between ALDERNEY and SARK - destination: Dixcart Hotel -** _What luck - what good fortune_, Sark's Island Constable Paxton congratulated himself. He had been hiding himself (though he knew, not very expertly) nearby the Alderney docks for two long, desperate days since Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer had appropriated the emerald ring and sent him packing with a threat to detain him for both illegally departing Sark and for disembarking upon Alderney without the correct paperwork.

Two days without food, sweating out what little water there was left in him trying to wrack his brain and figure out how to depart the island as he had been instructed to do _without_ the necessary assistance of appropriate paperwork.

And then finally, a moment of salvation: he had found the Kommandant's driver, the very man who had agreed and brought him. Of a certain, it was not the easiest thing in the world to broker a second deal with the man when his initial deal (a cut of the payout on the item he had expected to sell to Gisbonnhoffer) had fallen through.

Of course the chauffeur fellow knew nothing of the nature of that deal, nothing of the item in question - only that he, Paxton, had something of value with which to haggle.

But now, as there was no longer any reason to conceal anything, (and frankly, he had spoken to no other being in almost two days) Paxton eagerly told him all.

"Big as your thumb it were, too," he assured the Kommandant's man of the item's value - assured him of the great financial loss he had suffered due to the German Lieutenant's mistreatment of him. "And lush green as a Sarkese meadow in May."

Allen Dale could only hope that he received the news that Marion's ring had been found - (and even returned to Geis) despite its being located in entirely the wrong spot to corroborate her kidnapping story - with an appropriate expression of mild disinterest and 'what's in it for me'-ness. His actual mind was too busy swearing like the persistent chug of an oncoming freight train. His hands too busy hurrying the idiot sod Paxton into his launch. And his fingers trying to tick off the amount of time before they were landed, and him able to hike out to Le Moulin and get the windmill's now little-used mechanism running to alert Marion that she needed to lay low and make contact.

Any good grifter knows - can feel - the nearly imperceptible tension just before their lie is sussed out (not unlike the instant just before a fish bites on your line). Such tension now sang like unholy zither strings within his blood.

His stomach (usually by now on edge from casting off and embarking on the rough Channel waters) had tightened as it would when he felt the dice _just_ about to teeter and settle counter to his own good. But this moment, _this moment_ was far worse. Paxton's revelation seemed certainly to imply that shortly they were all about to experience whatever hell a man like Gisbonnhoffer could rain down upon them.

_And worse than that_? With Carter and Djak both still in-country (one hidden in plain sight), and Marion disenfranchised from everything that had once protected her, Allen Dale knew Unit 1192 and those they hoped to protect were not nearly prepared for what was surely to come.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Heindl Cottage -** "Pregnant?" Eva asked, her voice devoid of shock, once she and Marion had stepped into the cottage. "What symptoms have you had?"

As she waited for Marion's expected reply, the former ladies maid set about removing Marion's shoes (wet and growing rank from the spilled pickle juice) and bringing a basin of water for her to soak her now-briny feet in.

"Eva - " Marion tried to stall her from such servile ministration. "You needn't see to this. We are no longer - " she meant to finish with 'mistress and servant', but Eva cut her off.

"We are friends, _oui_? Let me help, as a friend."

At this, Marion relaxed. It had been such a long time since she had felt comforted by the closeness of an actual friend. "What of the pickles?" she asked, knowing that in better times they would be left to rotten in the field. Knowing that in present times such behavior would never fly.

"Our man, _Monsieur_ Miller, will see to them. They will be fine - and still make a lovely gift. _Merci_."

"_Monsieur Miller_?" Marion inquired, trying to remain detached about the topic, about the use of the name.

"_Oh, la! Monsieur_ Miller, a 'gift' of the Kommandant's. Very rough when he first came to us. So wounded - and his mind! _Sacre_! Certainly his being here has been no gift to him. He has been told he is in France. I hope you did nothing to show him otherwise?"

"I can't think what," Marion lied. On the Occupied Islands, even friendship only went so far. Smoothly on the defense, she quickly skipped back to their original subject. "I have lost track, but I think it must be two months since I've bled. I am hungry all the time - I cannot stop thinking about food." She smiled. "Even, I think, I am at getting a little belly."

Eva looked at her guest intently and tried to read her face. "I do not think this possible child is Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer's."

Marion matched her look, and returned it to her. "And I do not think this _Monsieur_ Miller has been much of a burden to you."

Eva did not disagree. She went through a secondary list of symptoms she had heard her mother put to any other women stopping by to confirm they were with child. As Marion slowly answered 'no' to each one, Eva's face grew ever more concerned. "I think - and I cannot yet tell if this is what you would wish to hear, or not, but I would tell you that you are not pregnant, _Cherie_. It is only that you have spent the last years living so well among Gisbonnhoffer and the others, continuing your lifestyle at Barnsdale that it has not touched you before this. The things you feel have only shown themselves in the last months since you left off living at the estate, yes?"

"Yes."

"Then I - and I think _Mere_ - would diagnose you with hunger. You are now hungry all the time, you cannot stop thinking about food. Such is the case of many an islander at present. As for the belly you say you are growing?" She tilted her head to one side, then righted it. "It can be a side effect of this, of coming starvation. And poor nutrition coupled with the labor to which you have now become accustomed can stop a woman's courses."

Marion's mouth turned dry, though she could not have said whether from relief or on-coming disappointment. _No wonder Eva could not sort her feelings on the matter_. Neither could she. "Does Hilda have something? A potion or elixir? Something by which we might be sure? It is important that I be certain of it as soon as possible, one way or the other."

Clearly expecting just such a request, Eva reached into a high, locked cabinet where Hilda kept her many brews and remedies. "I have used this on many a cow in my day," she told Marion. "Mere has crafted it from _une flleur_ local. You need only make water and mix several drops of this vial's contents with it. Should all turn black, you are with child. If nothing occurs, you are not." As she turned away from the cabinet and back to Marion, her eyebrow raised. "It is startling in its accuracy."

Marion accepted the vial and said nothing for awhile, as Eva busied herself finding a clean cloth for Marion's now soapily soaked (and hopefully better-smelling) feet.

At this time, Seth had managed to find his way back from his older cousins and into the cottage, where he set up a general hue and cry for some bread to be sliced for him.

Initially he was to Marion's back, and she could but hear the child.

Wanting, naturally, to catch a glimpse of Eva's youngest sibling (whom she had never yet laid eyes on), and (surely) Hilda Heindl's final child, she turned about in the chair, expecting to shortly be able to discuss with Eva which of the other children he best resembled, and how good looking a lad he must be, this child born brother to her friend while she, Marion (and Beau), had been off chasing ribbons, trophies, and engraved platters on the America Equestrian Circuit.

Marion had never been so thankful that Eva's back was turned, giving her a long moment in which to compose herself.

There, standing in the Heindl's more-hovel-than-proper-cottage, was her older brother Clem, aged four or five. Not that she could recall him at such a time personally as she had not yet been born. But rather, photographs of 'Handsome' Clem were not in short supply at any Nighten household. And in particular he had sat for a portrait with their father at just about this age, his dark hair perhaps longer - his dress far fancier and certainly not showing signs about the hem of any breed of dirt. His feet wrapped in shoes of softest leather. No, unless said portrait artist could see into the future, that likeness proved Seth Heindl to be the spitting image of a man who could only be _his_ father.

She would say in that moment that she caught her breath. That she stopped breathing, but somehow the most exquisite of local Dgernesiais curses sprang to her mind and shortly from her lips. Not loud enough to disturb the child, who was giving her a quizzical look so like one her brother might that she did shortly find herself out of breath. But loud enough to catch and hold Eva's attention.

"_Tchique_?" Eva asked, never having seen said portrait of Master (now Lord) Nighten.

Still, with a degree of breathlessness, Marion replied, not taking her eyes from the child whose hair was so much darker than any of his supposed 'siblings'. "I would have lied, too." She kept her gaze level, letting it bounce between the now-obvious mother and child.

Small tears began to fall from Eva's eyes. Still, maintaining her composure, she spoke through them. "_Cherie_," she declared, clearly with all her heart, "I would have told you if it had been safe. I would that he could have met Sir Edward, could have known him. I see it is a disaster - on top of all others - but my Seth has been safe, here. No one knows his father for an English lord. Many know me for his mother (if with the Occupation they have bothered to remember such petty gossip from before). But it was such a short - and very private - summer. I do not think Master Clem and I were ever seen together."

Marion took the child's hand. He looked back at her curiously, but did not pull away. "I know someone who I very much think would like to see you," she told him, then lifted her eyes to Eva.

She did not bother to bring up the more complicated thoughts she was experiencing: that in his dementia it was unlikely Edward would ever have understood the child for his son's out-of-wedlock offspring and not simply for a young Clem, himself. That pre-war she herself could not even imagine what her own feelings on the situation of such an unspeakable-in-good-company occurrence would have been. That the former Lady Nighten might not take to the situation at all; her beloved, pedestalled son having complicated his charmed life by this fruit of such an indiscretion - and with her own ladies maid.

But now, here in the Heindl cottage, all she saw before her was a child; uncomplicated, charming in his miniature likeness to his father, whom she had not seen in almost five years. She saw in Seth life, precious in its every form. She saw hope for a future in the eyes of Eva, his mother. She saw love, and even family.

She saw no space for drawing room disapproval. It was all she could do to hold herself together upon having found such an impossible thing. She would do what she could to see this inopportune child had every possible chance, and Eva with him.

"I wish I had something left...of his, to give you," Marion said, reaching her free hand out to her friend. "We are family now, Eva. And always will be."

"You must know," announced Eva, having taken Marion's offered hand, "I have never wanted or schemed for anything of his, of yours, of the Nighten's. In Seth, I have all I could ask for." She smiled, wiping away what was left of her tears.

"And so you do not love him anymore?" Marion asked, knowing Eva well enough to see that she would not have embarked on such a relationship had she not at one point thought it love-based.

"It is nearly five years past," Eva shrugged. "I am no longer that young girl, spying on the master of the estate as he builds a boat. Tumbled by a warm heart and a striking smile." She looked hard at Marion, addressing the elephant ever in the room of their two lives. "I am now a hardened _poule_ to the Kommandant, pursuing every possible preventative of which _Mere_ knows to keep from ever carrying _his_ child."

Marion's own face echoed Eva's hardness. "It would be wrong to judge you for what you have found you must subject yourself to so that you might protect your family. _My_ family," she added, indicating Seth.

Here Eva cast her net wide, in hopes of learning something of Marion's own situation. "And yet I am led to believe that you are no longer subjecting _yourself_ to it. At least not willingly, for some months. Yet here you are, asking if you are with child. Certainly not Herr Geis' child."

"No," agreed Marion, offering nothing further.

"Does he love you?" Eva asked, her narrowed eyes not referencing Gisbonnhoffer. "And you, him?"

It was impossible to answer with a straight face. "Idiotically so," Marion replied, unable to hold back a sigh.

"And a coming child would please him?"

"Ridiculously."

"And do you have...false illusions about one another? About the situation you are in?"

Marion shook her head.

Eva's brows raised with the question. "But you will say no more?"

"I will say that you were right that it was best not to tell me about your son," Marion said.

"Yes," Eva agreed, with a long look out the open door toward the small field beyond where _Monsieur_ Miller had nearly finished gathering up all of the dropped pickles. "There are some things best kept to oneself in such uncertain times."

* * *

It was not long after that Seth, who had wandered outdoors with his bread during their tete-a-tete, set up a squall over something one of the other children had done or not done to his liking. Eva begged pardon, and went to see what the trouble was, while Marion gathered herself and made ready to return to Thornton's cottage and await Allen's arrival.

Near the doorway several unframed photos had been hung. As her eyes glanced over them she saw one of young Seth that had been taken within the year. Unable to leave a note outlining the secret that she was only pinching it to deliver to the child's father, she grabbed it off its tack and slid it into the ample pocket of the apron that had once been Mrs. Thornton's that she wore.

She realized that she had no immediate idea of how to find Mitch again. She could not see him on the visible horizon, had no way of knowing where he might be located on the Heindl patch at such a time of day.

She made her way leisurely toward the outhouse, thinking to stall as long as possible. Just before entering, he managed to catch her eye from where he was within the cowshed, its lean-to-like design of three walls and an open front allowing the back, full wall that faced the cottage to shield them and their reunion from any unintentionally interested eyes.

But with a family of so many, and potential German guards sniffing about from time to time, their meeting was of necessity limited in both its scope and length.

Marion grabbed for his forearms, gripping them hard as she spoke as quickly as possible, feeling him for real, hoping to hold his complete attention. "We have long thought you dead at the word of Gisbonnhoffer. Take heart: a man has arrived from SIS, and tonight we await the arrival off-shore Sark of his rendezvous sub."

Mitch's eyes flared like just-lit, crisp tinder at her words of contact with home.

"Get away from this place as soon as you can. If you cannot, in the next few days I will send someone to you."

"It is complicated," he began, attempting to illustrate his being torn over Eva's (and her family's) safety and his own.

"It is _not_ complicated," Marion stressed, her eyes casting back at the cottage and knowing she had mere seconds before she'd best be gone. "Every moment you stay here you potentially compromise every man jack in your unit. La Salle, Djak. _Me_."

"Robin," he spoke the name she had not said.

"Get _away_," she repeated. "Stay clear of Barnsdale - and Thornton's cottage. They neither are safe any longer."

"This man, sent from home - how many may he take?"

"Two," Marion answered. "And Robin will not go."

"No, of course not," Mitch commiserated, fully understanding. "You?" he asked.

"I must do what I think right," she found was the only answer she could bring herself to give him.

Even from his customary position once-removed (ever at Robin's side), he knew her too well to miss out on seeing the near-flush of passion from her neck traveling up to her cheeks upon her declaration.

But she was quick to bury it, having learned far more command of herself and her visible reactions in the years she had spent on the islands.

Mitch had only started to notice the vanished grip of her hands digging desperately into his forearms when he realized she was gone.

* * *

As she reached the start of the cluster of trees on the edge of the Heindl's small field, Marion thought to herself that she had more explaining to do than she could ever have imagined upon her return home. To explain how she had become engaged to a Jerry officer, to lie about whose (likely) baby she carried. And to tell her brother that the mother of his unknown child was at playing an Island Kommandant's favorite strumpet - in part to protect the life and welfare of his young, bastard son.

Couple those concerns with her discovery of Mitch, imprisoned - but not - and her own necessary experiment with Hilda's flower potion, and she had more than enough food for thought to carry her well through her solo supper and the remaining wait for Allen Dale's arrival.

* * *

**SARK - Dixcart Hotel -** Wills handed Dale the money. It was easiest making contact with the unit's sole undercover member this way - under the pretence that it was owed him for some gambling debt or other. The Jerry officers in the hotel's common room did not even look up, so customary an exchange this was: Islander and Officer alike recompensing the Kommandant's driver for favors large and small, or the settling of outstanding gaming accounts.

Allen stopped Wills before Wills could get in announcing any of Allen's orders, sharing with him the need for speed in activating Le Moulin with all haste to signal Marion.

"And hurry the Cousins Jack," Allen used an old term for Cornish miners, "underground."

"How's that?" queried Wills, uncertain how Carter and Djak played so closely into Gisbonnhoffer's having discovered the ring.

"Trust me, Mate," Allen asked of him. "Sometimes a bloke just knows. And in this case something in me _knows_ bad weather's on its way. Lady Marion knows their whereabouts. The mines are safer for them than the farm."

"You couldn't possibly think Marion - not after all this time..." a smile of confused doubt began on Wills' lips.

"I don't slander anyone, Wills-" Allen hissed at him, trying to keep his voice in check and at the same time his hands trying to hurry Wills on his way.

"Better safe than sorry," Wills finished for him with an outsized nod.

"Better _safe_ than dead," Allen added under his breath, counting the tasks he had yet to perform (for both sides of the chessboard) before rendezvousing with Marion (at Robin's order) on Guernsey and ferrying her to Sark from where she would meet Stoker's sub, and then travel on to home.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Barnsdale roof -** He knew that just beyond the door to the roof, _Landser_ Thered stood inside the great house's attic at attention, waiting for his next order. He knew that the men _First-Landser_ Ellingheim commanded were at nearly having completed the demolition task of Lady Marion's private room below (though without further discovery). He knew that tying up the time and talents of such men on this present course of action would irritate the Kommandant.

But he could not allow himself to kowtow to that any more than he could leave the southeast facing section of Barnsdale's roof before he found..._whatever_ it was he had set out looking for.

The weather-aged spyglass never left his hand, though he rarely brought it up to sharpen his vision. He went over what he did know for the millionth time.

One, an engagement ring located NOT where it was said to have been lost by Marion while kidnapped. How did it travel to an entirely other corner of the small island?

Two, a mostly-immolated photograph concealed within the drapes and their lining in Marion's private rooms. Why hide such a thing unless it might, in someway, condemn either her - or the photograph's subject?

Three, contraband binoculars, which had apparently been left out upon the roof of Barnsdale since around the time Marion left the property. _At what had they been for looking_?

He did not count the crystal set found in the butler's pantry. He did not add the fact that Marion had lied to him, and had been married all the time she agreed to let him pursue her - and worse, even when she struck out at him, demeaned him, for the fact that he had concealed same from her.

His eyes again scoured the horizon. He looked to Sark, as Sark had given up the assumed-lost-forever ring, the token of his once sincere pledge.

His face felt gritty from lack of sleep, and an overdue need to shave. There, in the distance, lay his nemesis, in the form of a landmass - however miniature. Without (and even with) the spyglass he could distinguish little enough about it. The cliffs upon which it sat like a cake. Only a few very shallow rises in the lay of the land. And Le Moulin, the old windmill, which had done little enough work since the turn of the century. There were times the wind was strong enough to give what remained of its vanes a turn or two, but even he knew such random movements were not enough to engage its ancient grinding stone and coax it into productive laboring.

_Wait_. What was this? His eyes told him the wind was giving it a pounding even now. For the first time in three-quarters of an hour he raised the spyglass for a better look. He brought it down, then back up and looked again.

He felt the wind distinctly to one side of his face. His eyes would not lie: Sark's Le Moulin turned counter to the wind direction as felt, undeniably, upon his own skin.

The wind noticeably slackened. And yet Sark's windmill still turned. _Counter_ to the prevailing direction. Here was a physical impossibility. Here was an instance of water flowing uphill. Here was a paradox that to him meant he had found what he was looking for, even if he did not yet know what it meant.

Rather than taking the long way around on the graveled flat of the roof, he found himself scuttling, undignified, over skylights and two rainwater-catching tanks to get to the opposite side of the roof as swiftly as possible. His feet and boots - even the buttons on his uniform coat - clunked and rang against the tin and glass during his slippery, tractionless scramble over objects without perceivable handholds.

He did not bother to right his vestments upon reaching his destination. There was no one else about to see when he fell into place, one knee biting harshly into unsmoothed gravel, him catching himself on the fancy crenellations that formed the edge of the roof with his elbows. Without thought to how it might look, he panted through open mouth.

The countryside of Guernsey stretched out before him. Though not perched upon a terribly high altitude, the Barnsdale roof afforded him all the view of it he needed.

There, near the estate's edge - nearer, in fact, as the crow flies, to Mr. Thornton's cottage - sat Barnsdale's own long fallow windmill. Old, forgotten, its wood perhaps too rotten even for burning.

He did not have to repeat his journey across the roof to check on Sark's Le Moulin, to see if it was still counter-turning. Some newborn sixth sense within him told him that it still was.

_Windmills_, he thought. _There__ is my answer_.

And he went, immediately, to go and retrieve it.

* * *

**Thornton's Cottage -** Allen Dale had arrived in plenty of time to get the job (and its several parts) done. He had not been there much beyond a moment when Marion announced that she had taken care of contacting and liaising with Joss Tyr over assuming the now-open position of Nightwatch.

This had taken him aback, as he had allotted time in their schedule to arrange such. He sat and let himself drink long and leisurely from Thornton's well instead, choosing to believe Lady Marion's relative silence a consequence of her dislike at being ordered (as he thought she must surely have been) to beat her retreat behind lines.

Without complaint she accepted a place in the Kommandant's boot (once they had hiked out to the road and the auto), and he had driven to town, and specifically to the pier.

He was familiar enough with a double cross to at this time least have his suspicions raised. It was too simple, herself too docile for his own comfort.

The pier and its outbuildings were bare of people, water traffic usually having considerably slackened by this time of early evening. He checked in, from inside the auto at the gatehouse - which for him now meant little more than a tap of the brake and a friendly wave - and they found themselves alone nearby his launch's slip, within the shed commandeered for the shelter of the Kommandant's car.

She exited the boot without comment.

"Look," he apprised her, having waited until he felt she needed added incentive to continue to go along with the plan, "Geis 's got your ring - that emerald. It was found up by La Moinerie. Found in such a way that even he has now surely deduced that you did not spend all your captivity in a sea cave - as you have told him. Which will call him to question everything he knows about that incident. Right down to whether Carter really did get free of the islands."

Her face, at most, registered mild surprise. "And where is he now?"

"At Barnsdale. Looking for you, no doubt."

There was a slight bite to the inside corner of her lip. "I cannot think of that at present."

"Cannot think? It is the last nail in your coffin, _Pet_. No better reason for you and the babe to make your exit tonight on Stoker's sub."

"No babe," she told him, and his eyes grew skeptical, but he registered no tell in her demeanor.

"False alarm," she declared, infusing her delivery of the fact with as much unimpeachable sincerity as possible. Her memory showed her again the vial of Hilda's that had failed - repeatedly - to change color and confirm her suspected condition. "You may go and ask Eva yourself. Visit her at home. You will find someone there, as did I, most anxious for your call."

His brow cocked, considering the possible meaning of her speech.

"Mitch lives," she watched him closely. "Rather, _has been_ living. At Eva's."

Before she had finished the first sentence, his mind was already well-past formulating a plan.

Marion spoke again and set to interrupting it. So he cut her off, with far more dispatch and unvarnished rudeness than she ever usually encountered. "And _why_ did you not share that the very moment I walked in to Thornton's cottage?"

"Mitch is in no immediate danger from Eva and the Heindls," she assured him. "He now knows where he is, and he may well have already found a way to freedom. I could not have _you_ flying off with half-a-plan thinking, 'this is a rescue'. Not right now. Because it's not _me_ we need to ship home, it's Carter. And that is what I intend to do." Her stance had become bold, lit (to his eye) with truth. No question she meant what she said, here.

"Well, it's lovely that that's your assessment, my lady," he spoke in breezy fashion, having expected a last-minute balk from her before she boarded the launch, "but that is not the plan. Nor is it my orders. And I follow Ox when it comes to orders, not his someday Countess-wifey."

"Too bad," Marion said, falsely commiserating, "because _I_," she felt the weight of the tire iron in her hand behind her, out of view, noted that he was positioned conveniently in front of the still-open boot. "Need. Your. Boat."

She saw the answer easily in his eye before he could speak. The refusal as it formed. Saw that it was not the sole answer she was in the mood to tolerate at this juncture. Her hand tightened 'round the makeshift weapon as she brought it up to his skull. A skull whose potential thickness she had unkindly mused upon many a day - to herself and at times to Robin. It did not feel thick to her now. As she completed the arc of the blow and Robin's man fell back into the boot, a look of wonderment and disbelief upon his face, his hand having not come up fast enough to throw off the knock-out blow entirely, the sensation that radiated up her arm was the feeling not that she had rung his bell, cleaned his clock - or any other in a line of metaphors for hand-to-hand violence, but that rather she had taken a whack at a particularly unripe, unyielding melon.

Conscientiously she checked for the dilation of his eyes, holding a heavy lid open with her hand and trying to see what she could in the dim light. His eyelashes proved so unexpectedly long they tickled at the knuckle of her thumb. She checked his breathing, which was quite steady. Looked for broken skin or bleeding - of which there was none. She had not, after all, swung with all her might.

Assured that he would live until she returned (she only, after all, needed a good head start and a couple of hours to accomplish both her task and the travel involved), she used one of Clem's old sailing knots to tie his hands and feet together with what rope she could find in the shed, and closed him in the car's boot as she herself scattered down the short pier to his launch, and onto Sark, and the man whose island rescue she was about to affect.

* * *

**Nightwatch Windmill -** He did not like woods - even the smallest of ones as he was forced to assay here. They were nothing like the woods of his home, but he had not cared for those disorienting forests, either. Several times he thought he had become turned about, had lost his way. But each time he stuck with it, and was finally rewarded in the end. Once in sight of the windmill, from habit he drew his Luger - uncertain of what he might find within, and having brought along no other soldier to companion him.

The structure no longer boasted a door of any kind, only an open entry point. What was left of the rottening, useless vanes had been tethered to prevent their moving, so there was no need for him to dodge them as they spun on his approach through the doorway. He took only the briefest moment to survey the ground level (what was left of it) and its impressive stone and horse-hitch. The stairs to the half-cellar (where in its better days ground and to-be ground grain would have been stored) moaned as though they would not agree to bear his weight in his descent. There was little hope of his sneaking up on anyone, were there Resistance present.

Once his head cleared the support beam - even in the meager daylight that came from behind him (the light that came through the missing sections of floor and roof) he could see plainly what was before him. Hoarded supplies of food and other necessities were stacked along the still-dependable stone walls of the cellar. A row of lanterns next to a can of now-trebly valuable oil. Jars of preserved food, at least four large barrels - likely of things equally preserved in such a manner - a pile of neatly folded blankets, and more (though not nearly as much as the space might easily hold).

He looked to the floor, noting lines of dust and discoloration that seemed to indicate that at one time far more barrels and crates had been housed here. More supplies. _More illegal hoarding_. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a seal on a nearby barrel. The seal and sign of Barnsdale. He could not say it surprised him.

So he had found a storehouse. Proof that Marion - he was certain, Marion - had disobeyed Occupation Code and hidden these items here. What she had been using them for in the interim he could not say for sure. During her tenure at Barnsdale certainly she had little enough need or use for such surplus.

Had she been at playing - what was the English nursery tale? - _Robin Hood?_ - stealing from her own estate and distributing it among the island's needy?

It did sound of something she might do.

His attention to the floor showed him something else. A generous patch of now-burnished to brown red, just at the foot of the stairs. He was enough of a soldier to recognize it for blood. To determine that it had not been there a great length of time. He went down on one knee (the opposite one of the one he injured in the gravel on the roof) to better examine it, when he saw something of a small table, whatever was atop it covered with peasant-spun cloth. Bumpy and irregular-sized items sat interestingly underneath as they might under a covering blanket of snow. In two strides he had crossed to it and whisked off the cloth.

It was not, simply, another crystal set. He realized in that moment that he had half-expected it to be. Perhaps that was as close as his mind would agree to go toward what deep down he was realizing - was processing - as the truth.

A microphone with chrome too old and worn to still be considered shiny, its transmit button covered by the cable cording wrapped about it, waiting tidily to be unwound, laid and connected for the next broadcast.

A phonograph, under a second covering in an effort to prevent it from taking on dust.

With his gloveless hand he grabbed at the circular head, in which the swinging arm ended, and which held the needle. He brought his thumb up to the chip of diamond that would lay in the vinyls' circular groove and create the sound. He wanted to snap it off, sever the round, flat metal head, but found it would take more strength, more force, than was in his hand to do so. He pulled away from it, finding it had broken through the skin - and even slight callus - on the pad of his thumb. He stuck the small wounding into his mouth, sucking lightly at the blood that had showed there.

There was no proper chair, only another, shorter barrel with an all-too-thin quilt upon it. He let himself drop into it, and turning to his left sighted album after album of records. Without even looking at them, he rose, taking the stairs two at a time until he was again outdoors - until his eyes made out the rather-ingeniously-concealed antenna that made any other translation of what he had just found utterly implausible.

Back down he went again, this time taking each record out of its jacket, one-by-one. Poring over the song lists, trying to stop himself before enjoying the covers with photographs. Had he not been such a faithful student of the Nightwatch he would scarcely have recognized the artists' names. Jews, Negroes - almost all of them American entertainers banned by the Germans. So very few British. Several Germans - but nothing from this century - only long-dead composers. Once he had the heavy, fragile black disks in a single, large stack, he lifted and dropped the stack as one onto the floor at his feet. He raised a single, efficient jackboot, and stomped a single, efficient time.

The records - the lifeblood of the Nightwatch. Not enough to simply transmit news, to illegally pass on information about the Allies - the enemy. No, his people, _him_ - he must be doubly-defied by the broadcasting of this sub-human art form.

Very well, the Nightwatch - _Marion's Nightwatch_ - was now irreparable. Here - if only symbolically - she was under his boot. All of Guernsey and the other islands that had dared listen, dared tune in - subject to _his_ dominance. And though they did not yet know it, _he_ would be the breaking of them.

He found the notion stuck. _Irreparable_.

_Yes_. More of that.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** You have my promise that before posting another chapter I will get current with replies to all of your generous and very much valued reviews. _Thank you_.


	47. The best laid halfaplans often go awry

**SARK - La Salle's farmhouse - Early evening of Roger Stoker's planned rendezvous/departure -** Robin Oxley finished the last of his farm-related chores and found himself, unsurprisingly, contemplating his coming farewell to Marion. Dale should arrive with her in the next hour, unless they two had run into trouble.

Behind him, in the distance, he knew Le Moulin continued in its counter-turning, and would do so until Marion set foot safely onto Sark, and he was satisfied that she had been apprised about Gisbonnhoffer's coming back into the possession of the ring of engagement he had given Marion, and the inherent danger that occurrence seemed to birth.

It had been a last-ditch effort, really, engaging the signal of Le Moulin. Though Marion was no longer at Barnsdale (its roof offering one of the best views of the ancient windmill) there were still various points along the eastern coast of Guernsey from which it could be seen. He could only hope that she had managed to catch sight of the warning signal. Or that she had laid low of her own instincts, keeping quiet and out of the way until traveling here - he found he almost thought 'home', connecting Sark (or at least La Salle's farmhouse in some way) with the notion of a base of operations, of a place of rest and belonging.

Their time to be together grew quite short. Soon enough he would be sending her truly home, away from here. And from this night on he would sleep in the knowledge that she was safe. Sleep, yes, but abandon the restfulness he had come to know since they had reconciled, wed, and set to living life (however sporadically) as one.

In a way (though he would refrain from mentioning it aloud) he was glad to have the secondary pressure (after the original impetus of the babe she carried) of Gisbonnhoffer having discovered the ring. Felicitously not a moment too soon, either. Just as Mr. Oxley was in need of a final, persuading force for Mrs., here it was. Marion, after all, he well knew, was not above jumping ship. The greater the number of reasons for her to retreat, the more comfortable he felt that she would behave sensibly, rationally, and as they had earlier decided.

He looked down to the cuff ring now on his smallest finger, praying that her early-morning promise to him that she would evacuate the islands with Stoker would prove more whole and lasting that the gapped jewelry that signified their greater vow.

His eyes came up and went immediately toward the horizon, and the promise it held that soon she would appear there.

He marveled at how a man in such a moment might say farewell.

At their first parting he had not known what would be its lengthy duration, and he had left her with no gently parting words - or any words - that he preferred to recall. Today, at this juncture, he found himself thinking that the Earl, actually, might best know what to say.

_What to articulate, after all, when you know not when you might (if ever) see one another again? How to say what is needed without scaring your departing beloved into changing her mind?_

Stretching out his arms he felt their strength, their solidness. It could be, in the end, they were all he might be able to offer her in that moment.

The wind coming off the sea stung at his eyes, and he considered whether (if he were going to have to struggle against it) if now were a good time to give into a brief blub. (Certainly losing it as he packed her off with Stoker would not do.)

He was still considering this when Stephen came out of the house at a near-trot, risking stumbling as he had left his stick indoors. Immediately Robin went to his side.

"Iain - _John_ - has been detained," Stephen gasped to the commander of Unit 1192.

"There are Jerries at the house?" Robin jumped to conclude, "sent for you?" A wince took over his expression. Stoker had only just been smuggled away by Wills on his path toward the coast and the rendezvous point half an hour prior.

"No," Stephen caught his breath, one hand resting on Robin's supportive forearm. "The oldest Rufford boy has run to tell me. It is not known what has happened, but he is being held in the old jail - by the Island Constable. The Germans are not yet involved."

Robin agreed to relax only slightly at this news. "It will not be long before they are," he replied, grimly, and Stephen heard a scrape of his teeth following his conclusion.

"Of a certain," Stephen agreed, now able to straighten his posture. "Come with me," he patted Robin's arm, "to see the _ReichKaptain_. A little sorting on this end can only help mitigate what may occur on the other."

"Here, here," Robin agreed, aware with deepest regret that their cross-island trek to where _ReichKaptain_ Lamburg kept his office would likely consume the time he had hoped to spend with Marion. And possibly longer. But there was no help for it - John was taken, and must be freed at any cost. It was no small blessing the Jerries had yet to become involved in the matter. Perhaps it would not take as long in the sorting as he feared it might.

Robin encouraged Stephen to return to the house and grab his stick before they set out, and for a moment he was left alone, the wind now to be his only message carrier as the house was empty and there no expedient process in place to get a message to those at the mines. "I'm comin' back, my love," he spoke into it, willing the sentiment to catch and stick, as did the Channel's salt that caught frequent rides upon its gusts.

John, of course, had to be sorted - and quickly - before any Jerries took an interest in him. There was nothing for it but to see to it. He would not allow himself space to imagine that the time needed in doing so would prevent him from returning in time to see Marion off.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - St. Peter Port Docks - Kommandant's car shed -** "You. Nincom_poop_ bungler, bollixing up my evening - very possibly my morning, and, with what I would be _tempt_ed to call clever (did I not know it was wholly without intent and rather stemmed wholly from your unmistakably idiot-nature) machinations, my _en_tire military career - long and distinguished though it has been - this revelation of yours may fell it entirely. I do not _care_ for thoughts of the Russian Front, Herr Geis," the Kommandant railed to him (the board walls of the car shed no doubt trembling with every acid-filled word) giving equal weight to Geis' announcement that he had discovered Lady Marion to be the Nightwatch _and_ to the notion that, as they stood over the boot of his motorcar, his still-out-cold chauffeur would likely be unable to provide his usual services.

The chilly calculation returned to his tone. "I care for such thoughts as little as do I for the becoming-ever-more-_ob_vious fact that I am momentarily without a driver for the immediately foreseeable future."

Geis did not know what had prompted the Kommandant to inspect his own car's trunk. At times his commanding officer simply seemed to work on a network of instincts and excess senses where such things were concerned. In this case he had obviously been right in doing so.

They had found the man, Mr. Allen, bound wrist and ankle with negligible lengths of some old and brackish fishing rope.

The Kommandant raised his electric torch, illuminating the large, shadow-throwing knot grown unnaturally onto his driver's head. Neither German took any time to speculate about what might have landed the driver in such a predicament, though the possibilities were myriad: a gambling double-cross, an act opposing collaboration by one among the Resistance, simple robbery, jealous lover. With a man like Dale Allen, it would be hard to accurately speculate. The only thing for it would to be ask him directly when he came 'round.

At present, Vaiser's mood was best described as skillet-hot anger. He hopped about from foot to foot, his outrage taking in (and taking on) anything in his present line of sight. Geis had expected him to show dismay at the news of Marion's double life. Dismay, but ultimately pleasure. (The Nightwatch, after all, would now be finished.) Such an expectation had proven a great miscalculation.

"Do you like sun," Vaiser asked, a snap in his tone and delivery, "being on the water? The dependable arrival of supplies both necessary and utterly frivolous? Pretty girls? Fresh meat? Cigarettes? Hot running-water?" His eyes returned to the open trunk. "You may accept my guarantee that the Russian Front offers none of these things."

In such moments of Vaiser's beside-himself emotional overload, Geis Gisbonnhoffer knew not how best to placate his superior. As usual, he did not try, sticking solely with a respectful, possible-to-translate-as-sincere, "Sir."

"She didn't want _you_, Gisbonnhoffer." Vaiser switched tacks, knowing it too late to do any good, but still trying to counsel the younger, less-highly-ranked man. "She wanted her house, her comfort, her maintained standard of living." Exaggeratedly, he wagged his head, 'no'. "Never did want you. USED you. Funny part is," here he looked back up at his disgraced lieutenant, a piquant purse to his lips, "she's kept you well at bay from USING her." For a moment his spite-filled rant fell away from him. "Cunning, that. If she weren't so against my type, I might be tempted to try and turn her, lure her to my side."

He slammed the trunk lid shut, uninterested in whether it disturbed the injured man within (or perhaps hoping it might). With the slam, he seemed to change gears, waving Geis up toward the driver's door.

For a moment Geis nearly asked if they oughtn't move the chauffeur from the enclosed trunk and lay him across the rear seat, in consideration of his injury, but he held back the question when he could nearly hear the Kommandant's reply ringing in his mind, "I say, Gisbonnhoffer, as fond as I am of the man I've no interest in having his raffishly handsome face nestled in my lap as we drive down the road - _how_ever, if you desire such intimate time with him...I feel certain it can be arranged."

Realizing the Kommandant was expecting him - in the absence of anyone else available to drive - to take the wheel, Geis opened the door for Vaiser and walked to seat himself behind the wheel.

"The brat's mother," Vaiser was now on to an unrelated topic, "Lady Adalgisa, has taken it into her head that I ought host the...thing...for the _occasional_ dinner at my manor on Alderney." He sighed and tsked loudly. "Take me 'round to your Barnsdale so that I might inform Fraulein Vaiser of such. While she sees my driver settled there for his (one would hope, swift) recovery, and dresses, I shall require several men to accompany me on a bit of reconnaissance nearby. _You_ may await our return at your house, and then transport myself and the girl back here."

Again, he fell back on the reliable standby, "Sir." He tried not to grate his teeth. He did not care for being relegated to stand-in chauffeur. Not any day would he care for it. Much less on the day he had captured (well, perhaps not just yet, but surely _unmasked_) the Nightwatch. The day he had long dreamed about, the imagined moment that gave him chills and sensations beyond any fleshly pleasure he had yet experienced: informing his superior that he had done it. He had cracked the code, tracked the Reich's prey. The Nightwatch was his, was within his easy grasp. The object of his obsession (his double obsession, as he had found out) more real than she had ever been. Her capture and interrogation imminent. His reward - what prizes such an act of detection might attract to it - the closest it had been in years.

And yet, in the eyes of the Kommandant, the problematic factors of the deception his lieutenant had unspooled before him clouded over any excitement, or even satisfaction, in the reveal.

"And as for yourself, Gisbonnhoffer?" Vaiser, as was his way, took a hairpin turn back on to his prior topic, "I care not how you go about it, but I promise there will be _none_ of the ballyhoo and back-slapping you may have envisioned upon the Nightwatch's arrest." He nearly spat as he continued. "We can hardly make a scene of it without revealing how simple-minded our officers have been, being duped for years by a mere girl - your one-time fiancee."

The atmosphere in the motorcar took on the smell of brimstone.

He did not wait; he waded in and took the chance offered him. "Should I not pursue her without delay?"

"And make sure, what?" Vaiser started at belittling him. "That she doesn't throw herself into the Channel to try and escape the island? You claim you have studied her for years, and yet you speak as though you know her not at all," he scoffed. "Lady Marion is too prideful to easily worry that she might be on the cusp of capture. Her behavior over the years shows she thinks herself far too smart and high-born to fall prey to any of our traps. I, for one, grant her a degree of foe-worthiness that she, until now, never has. As for the Nightwatch, she is as dependable as the cockcrow. You have found her home base. What more need you to do other than be there tonight to intercept her when she arrives to transmit?" He waved his hand as if dismissing the question of the nuts-and-bolts of her capture entirely. The matter-of-factness in his tone fell away, leaving nothing but hissing menace. "Your one order?" His eyes narrowed, his brow contracted. "Clean. This. Up."

Following Gisbonhoffer's obedient, 'sir', they rode in silence for long minutes, and it was not until they passed under the gated arch onto the Barnsdale estate that the Kommandant's voice could again be heard from over his shoulder.

"I never want to hear of it again. Of _her_ again. I never even want to get the vague feeling you are thinking of her again. Enlist Diefortner's help. And keep in mind (as you will find out if you are not careful): there are things this world has to offer worse than simple death."

He had pulled the car up to the house, opened the rear car door, and heard Vaiser threaten further as he disembarked the car, nearly purring, "If you find your limited mind unable of call any up, ask Diefortner. I believe he has been at compiling a list."

It was a deliberate step Vaiser chose in ascending the steps up from the gravel to the entrance, and it was an equally deliberate snap of his fingers that set four soldiers (_his_ men, Geis tried not, in that moment, to recall) to removing the still unconscious chauffeur from the boot of the car.

* * *

**Heindl Cottage -** Mitch Bonchurch knew it was not immediately unusual to find soldiers flanking the Heindl cottage. Of a certain they stopped by regularly enough in their irregularity to check on his presence, try to scare up something of fear within him.

At these times, generally, the Heindl children would know it best to scatter. Today they had behaved likewise. Hilda herself had been gone on foot to some far-flung place for the better part of the day, hunting for some rare island herb or another that bloomed only for six days a year.

Generally, Eva stayed with him, though. Her sweet face in those times often the only thing upon which he could fasten his eyes without being carried off in panic, thinking of the searing physical and mental torment the Jerries might quickly enough send him back to. Not merely torment, but now a life without Eva to bring him back from that certain brink. _As she had done_. As he knew - believed - she would do again without thought to behaving otherwise.

Why the Jerries had to choose tonight to check up on him - this night in which his insides were torn after a day of learning he was yet on Guernsey, seeing Marion - having been found! And knowing that it was his sworn duty to return to Robin and the unit with all haste. He should have gone by now, skipped out and been at arranging a passage to Sark, or at the least an overnight hiding place. But if he had, a contrary part of him said, what would now have become of Eva - of the family entire - when she could not produce him for the soldiers? Perhaps this was better: he would go tomorrow. That would leave possibly even as much as a month before the Jerries would return. Surely (even from 1192's base on Sark) he could come up with a solution to the Heindl (the Eva) quandary within that time - with the help of the other lads.

He heard Eva call out his name, and he stepped through the front doorway, ready - steeled - to confront his captors.

"So very nice to see you again, Mr. Miller," he heard in velvet-voice, before noticing the Kommandant pacing behind the chair in which Eva sat at the table. "And you, looking so hearty, so much more robust than upon our last meeting. I trust you have been enjoying your stay in France? I would have visited sooner, of course, but what with the present difficulty of travel and all, and such a backlog of work to be seen to...well, I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me?"

Staggered and silenced by the man's appearance, Mitch said nothing. He felt his palms, and the nape of his neck begin to sweat.

"Can this be? Can it really be? You have nothing to say to me? Nothing, no news to share?" the Kommandant feigned shock, one hand splayed across his chest. "_I_ who saved you from Joseph and my regrettably ham-handed Lieutenant? I cannot imagine such lack of reciprocity, of courtesy! What _do_ they teach one at fishermen's school these days? _Only_ Latin, then? Nothing of manners? Of deportment?"

It was such a reptilian-slick move the Kommandant hardly seemed to have shifted position at all, yet he had managed to pin Eva, now standing, to his side, and part her teeth with the snubbed barrel of his firearm.

Mitch, eyes to nothing but Eva - thoughts for nothing but Eva - saw her eyes grow round in response to having been taken, so shockingly, into such a hold.

Vaiser took a private moment to relish the unhidden affection he found in the Sarkese fisherman's eyes. _Too easy, really. Just as he had expected_. A little time with his best girl, Eva, and the sorry excuse for an Islander was sunk. Who or what wouldn't the man now sell out (and how quickly) on her behalf? Oh, but he felt her familiar curves against his side, the enamel of her teeth here and there in gritty contact with the pistol barrel.

_Oh, this __was__ quite fun. He ought to play at such pseudo peril more often. Jolly good time._

Her breath quickened, and he marveled with personal pride at what a good little actress she could be.

"Come now," Vaiser encouraged the fisherman, "out with it. Everything you know about the action planned for tonight."

At this command, Eva's eyes opened wider. Mitch saw her head move incrementally from side to side. His smitten and trusting heart took it to mean that she felt he mustn't put himself out on a limb for her. That he mustn't stop her from nobly giving her life to protect him, and whatever he might know.

How his soul ached at the sight of her, acting so bravely, so nobly. Sweat overran his brows and began to impede his vision. His mouth grew slack. He would have drooled from its corner had his tongue and throat not grown so unbearably dry. His mind showed him the Jerries' _die maschine_, recalled its pain and torment, reminded him he had not capitulated to it. He had, instead, let it break him to a point that he no longer could have capitulated to it - or the Germans' demands for information. Somewhere inside of himself, unconsciously, he had chosen insanity, eventual death - madness, even - rather than the betrayal of his fellows.

His heart double-skipped in its beat, the lack of those dependable, ever-present pumps giving him cause to think he might be experiencing cardiac arrest.

He had kept his secrets when there was only himself to sacrifice, only himself to lose. He had not known Eva. Not loved Eva.

He spoke quickly, his words almost slurred, sharing the only information - and that itself rather lean - he had. "There is. To be...a rendezvous with a British sub tonight on the Sarkese coast." His teeth chattered as though he were in Antarctic waters - as though he were one of Shackleton's doomed men, "I do not know where."

The Kommandant's eyes narrowed. All play (however perverse) fell away from him. "Coming ashore or taking away?"

"Taking!" Mitch shouted, his hands involuntarily raising in emphasis, so desperate was he to get the gun away from its position where it might do harm to Eva. "Taking away!"

Vaiser paused, a peculiar stillness settling upon him - a man rarely given to immobility - re-examining the fisherman's face. "I knew you were the one, my boy," he announced in a calm, sagacious tone. "I knew you were the very one to help me out in just such a pinch. But now the question, of course, is how to prevent you from running off and squealing to these fellows of yours, isn't it? Running. Let's see. Legs. Yes. Legs, useful in an escape." Vaiser gingerly withdrew the pistol from Eva's mouth, and fired it twice - both proving blanks - until he buried the third, live round deep into the bone of Mitch's thigh.

As Mitch lay on the cottage floor, trying not to writhe or whimper any more loudly than he was in response to the shocking pain, his eyes still unable to be taken off Eva, Vaiser grabbed her cheeks between the fingers and thumb of his free hand, and brought her mouth sloppily, disgustingly to his. He kissed her long, and embarrassingly intimately.

"_Sancta simplicitas_!" Vaiser declared, at what he took for Mitch's naivete, always willing to shove Mitch's nose into his unexpectedly-precocious-for-a-mere-fisherman's knowledge of Latin. "Not likely I'd go and sink a bullet into my best girl, is it? I don't much care for damaged goods, after all. Seen quite enough of those." He pulled a disgusted face. "Now _you_ stay put," he waved the still-loaded pistol in Mitch's direction as he handed out orders. "I may well be calling again. And you," he waved it now in Eva's direction, where she stood without his assistance, her mouth and the skin about it appearing red and misused, "see to..._things_," he indicated the area where Mitch lay, flooded and flooding with blood from his wounding, "here, but do endeavor to be on time tonight - despite the temporary loss of my proper driver. You _know_ how I can get when I am left too long stag at a party. One so hates to finish up with all the 'fun' before you even get there."

* * *

**SARK - Abandoned Little Sark Mines -** Thomas Carter had been more than a little taken aback at the unexpected, nervous, antsy arrival of Marion Nighten at the mine. It had been a busy enough day at this hideout; Johnson had come and gone, Djak had startlingly shown up - escorted here (surprisingly - clearly without Oxley's knowing) by Wills, who had shortly taken himself off somewhere on another task of the unit's.

Necessary farewells had been said to Royston, who had departed at the appointed time to rendezvous with the British agent who had already traveled cautiously toward the submarine rendezvous point.

It had been Carter's understanding that the Lady Marion was to have been brought, under the auspices of Allen Dale, to La Salle's farmhouse where she was to take her leave of Robin, and then make her own way down to what remianed of the standing stones on Heather's-Edge Heath and the narrow beach where they three island departees would await the sub's signal.

Certainly she had not been expected here.

At present, he was at finishing up a shave in what chipped sliver of looking glass they had brought to this place for such a purpose. His large side-chops had been so grown-out he had had to inaugurate the job with scissors before endeavoring to proceed. He was trying to rush so that they would not be delayed, but it had been some months since he had been properly shaved, and taking the necessary care was somewhat at odds with the essential need of speed. Thus far, he had not nicked himself.

"I've come to see you off home," she had said to him upon her arrival, once her eyes had grown fully accustomed to the low light belowground.

"That is a neat trick," he had answered casually, not sure what to make of her announcement. "However did you manage it?"

"Tire iron," she replied, without elaborating further.

His brain again made note that she had arrived alone - without her assigned escort of the man Dale.

"Grab what you need," she hurried him. "I do not think we've much in the way of time. I do not wish to arrive too early to the appointed spot, lest we be turned away or restrained by force, but we cannot risk missing our chance, either."

"Here, here," he agreed, and in a trice had applied what was left of his crumbling RAF uniform, socking away anything he could find that might prove useful in its various flap-covered pockets. He had (perhaps rudely) set in to shaving himself without asking permission. "And the child?" he inquired, "you have agreed to risk it?" It felt odd (and out-of-the-ordinary) for him to be asking after the life that might well be sacrificed in order to facilitate the saving of his own. It was not the sort of question he would have asked a year ago. Neither asked, nor pondered upon. Then, there had only been escape. There was, even now, space for little else. And yet, there _was_ space.

"I agreed to Robin's wish for me to go when I thought there was a child," she confessed to him, bowing her head slightly. "I have since confirmed that there is not. There remains no reason to safeguard me more than any other member of the unit." Her gaze was steadily upon him, her pupils either wildly well-trained in the art of a lie, or no falseness to be found within her assertion.

"And Oxley knows this?" razor into the basin.

She cocked an eyebrow (though without annoyance), and answered. "He will as soon as you are safely away and I return to the farmhouse to inform him."

Carter slid the straight razor one last time over his freshly-revealed skin. _Finished_. "Then I agree. We have no time to lose. Shortly enough they will figure out why you have not arrived to bid your husband goodbye. Then we will find ourselves chased toward the rendezvous - and not just by Jerries we can have no scruples about wounding."

It was at this point Djak entered the crudely fashioned chamber, their conversation not lost on her in a hideout where any need for private conversations went against rather live acoustics.

"Rendezvous?" she asked, having heard the foreign-to-her word rather a lot over the last few hours. At the sight of Carter's startlingly clean-shaven jaw her expression showed she needed no further clarification.

Her instantly wary eyes went to Lady Marion, whose only response to her was to nod her head as if to say, 'yes. It is now time, he is going.'

"I will never see you again," Djak said to Carter, her eyes large, in tune with the darkness of the converted mineshaft about them. She said it as though she had never before truly considered it.

Carter had been at making certain the waist of his trousers and the banded waist of his uniform coat were in harmony. In response to her words, he lifted his head, so that he might look at her. "No," he agreed with her summation, "Probably not."

They stood a long space at the acknowledgement of this, silence (or what passes for silence in a converted mineshaft) hallowing the air about them.

Marion flicked a glance to Carter, her mind circling their limited timeframe, and took herself off and away to the base of the ascending stairs.

Djak did not notice. She had been taught not to fear endings, but also not to shy away from the emotions they inspired. "Then I will miss you," Djak said to him, with as much feeling and passion as she might have infused into a statement of love. "For the rest of my life."

Her gaze remained solemn, and keenly upon him, and he found he could not easily bear such examination. So he looked away. "You made a better boy, Djak," he said. He hoped, perhaps, such a statement (which he felt to be eminently true) might dismiss some of the sprung tension that had only moments ago entered the air. That it might make this parting easier to slough off. But of course (he guessed) this was not in harmony with the Romany way. Nor would this have been the Russian way, the way Prince Alexsei, son of Igor, Komonoff would have been expected to part with his brethren. That would have involved at least one long night of much vodka, tears - manly kisses - possibly, quoted poetry. "A better boy," he echoed himself.

As could be expected, her reply was astute to the point of nearly cutting him, it hewed so close to the true quandary at hand. "You only say that because you don't know what to do with me now."

Still, no matter her reliably intuitive insight, he stubbornly dissented. "I only say that because it's true."

Here an eyebrow flicked, as though he had initiated a challenge. A challenge worth pursuing. "Then you would stay if I..?" she began.

But here he knew he had to put a stop to it. "No," he answered honestly, and he saw in her expression that she, too, had known better. "I must go," he committed himself, leveling his glance at her and letting true sincerity seep into his words, "and you must live your life as who you really are."

For a moment, the mineshaft about them seemed slick with moisture, until he realized it was, instead, the tears pooling in her eyes as she answered him. "With you," she declared, though in a quiet, measured way, "I have always been who I really am."

Against the overall mood of the moment, at her words he felt himself crack into his seldom seen smile. "Then I, too," he promised - with no doubt he would keep faith with it, "will miss you, Djak. For the rest of my life."

"May it be a long one," she pronounced to him, as though in Gypsy blessing.

"And may yours be happy," he brought his hand up to her shoulder height, and rested it - as one might with a boy - upon her head. "And one day free."

Looking at her, there in her height below him, he had a spilt second in which he felt nearly moved to bring his hand down affectionately upon the side of her beardless face, in ghostlike whisper of a touch. Instead, his fingers balled into a fist, which seemed to signal some finality to him, and he turned, knowing she would not be the one to break the moment - and knowing that to safeguard the next step in his life, that he must.

* * *

It would come to often be how he thought of her, of Djak, there, her dusky skin in the darkened cave, yet something shining from her eyes, from her self, that seemed to illumine the cramped, close space and elevate it into something more important than a mere hideout or safe house. A luminosity that he had not correctly translated nor understood when first he encountered her (or it) in that hellish office cupboard of Gisbonnhoffer's, that similarly tight space of his Alderney getaway car's trunk - when the sunlight receded in a sea cave that had provided them temporary shelter from their pursuers.

Perhaps it had never, in those present moments, actually been there. Perhaps it was only in the memory that existed. He would often ponder if such incongruity made any difference.

* * *

Thomas Carter moved quickly past an improvised partition and toward the steps that would lead him toward Lady Marion, and what remained of the sun's light, his back necessarily turned to the pull of this other, far more elusive-in-the-understanding-of-it radiance.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Barnsdale Estate -** The fog surrounding Allen Dale proved to be a thick one. Yet, rather than waking disoriented, his thoughts hazy and unconnected, finding himself upon his back he began to instantly spring forward and lunge for Marion, meaning with his every resource to prevent her from escaping with his launch and subverting the already-agreed-upon plan of action.

In this, he did not get far. It took little more than the necessary tension shooting into his shoulders for said spring to die before it could be brought about. The pain in his head, and extending even to his upper muscles (such as those in his shoulders and neck), prevented any movement that would portend immediate physical collapse (and likely further loss of consciousness).

It took a moment for his ears to snap-to, and his hearing to come fully back to him. His eyesight was still trying to settle into some approximation of adequate when, from the voices surrounding him, he was able to deduce that he was in the presence of Vaiser, Gisbonnhoffer, some flunky at Barnsdale, and - without her speaking, only recognizing her particular perfume - Fraulein Vaiser.

The realization that his eyesight appeared to be indefinitely compromised was enough to make any formerly blinded soldier well beyond uneasy.

He was on a couch. Not, as he would have expected, in the chauffeur's flat above the carriage house - the suitable place for one such as himself - but rather within the estate's house proper. As the colors of the room resolved about him, he recognized their scheme, the furniture from his nighttime ramblings and pinchings about the estate, and knew himself to be laid out upon the chaise that faced the fireplace in what had formerly been Lady Nighten's - and then Eleri's - suite of rooms.

Rather a posh address for a mere driver. In the background, Gisbonnhoffer and the Kommandant were engaged in rather rough (and for Gisbonnhoffer, undeniably petty-in-tone) conversation with one another. Their speech came to his ears like distant, rumbling thunder signaling a stronger storm soon to arrive.

Along the area of the outer side of his thigh, he could feel the skirts of Fraulein Vaiser as they pressed against him, her back to him, her facing the fireplace, seeming (at least) to listen attentively to what was taking place.

He tried to reach for her hand without moving any portion of his body beyond that of his arm, but after several grasping, sluggish attempts, he had yet to capture it, and he knew better than to stretch or have a go at re-positioning himself to make getting hold of it easier.

The color of the skin of her hand swam in and out of his vision where it rested next to the darker fabric of her frock's skirt. One moment it seemed quite close, the next as though it were located down some deep corridor.

He tried again, "Fraulii - " he managed from a throat that felt more of sandpaper than slick gullet. His hand fumbled, ineffectively, among the folds of her skirt until finally his clumsy fingers tapped into hers. Hers shivered for a moment, not expecting his touch, and then, in reflex, opened so that he might slip his into her grip.

She turned, her eyes wary as they skimmed the room behind the chaise he occupied. Reconciled to whatever she had seen, she dropped to a knee beside the fainting couch, bringing her face closer to his.

She did not let go of his hand, did not throw it away from hers. His skittish eyes reacted strongly to her moving nearer to him, and in refocusing, his brain shot pins of pain into his skull.

"They are gone," she told - almost assured - him. "You have been, in some way no one immediately understands, injured."

"Aye," he agreed, still huskily, no detail involved in his head's bashing in forgotten.

In the saying of it he did not realize it, but his hand tightened considerably about Eleri's own.

She nearly gave a 'yip' in response to the powerful pinch it gave her knuckles. "I am ordered to stay and see you well settled here," she told him, "before dressing to accompany my father to Alderney for an dinner this evening." Her face opened to him, curiosity and possible concern mixing in her expression. "Can you not say who has done this to you? Is it, as Herr Geis expects, a gambling debt gone unpaid? A moment in which you gave a German more cheek than was advisable?"

It hurt to will his eyes to focus too intently, but as was his way, he wished to see as deeply into hers as possible in that moment. It was a great risk he was about to take - though what other feasible option was left open to him he certainly could not see (no matter how improved his physical vision might become). He reminded himself; he had trusted this girl before. And he remained confident her loyalty to Lady Marion easily outweighed same to her father, or to her birth country.

Pointless of him to try and go over the Barnsdale staff in his head, play at deducing which of the domestics at present working in the house might or might not still be loyal to the Nighten family. No, it was to be Eleri, or it was him getting up off this couch, taking two shaky (though defiant) steps towards being a hero, and falling prey again to unconsciousness - if not death. So Eleri it would have to be.

"It were Lady Marion," he told her, pausing to lick his paper-dry lips and allow her a moment to react to the startling news.

The pupils of her eyes contracted at his announcement, but she did not vocally naysay him.

"And she must be found," he declared. "She has taken my launch and fled the island."

"Then how shall I ever find her?" came the perfectly reasonable question, rendered (surprisingly) in the low tones of a near-whisper. In this instance, one would hardly guess her for a tiro.

"I need water," he said. "Please."

He did not risk sending his eyes to track her as she crossed to retrieve it from a tray that had been brought, but his ears heard the unsteadiness of her hand as she raised the crystal carafe to the tall glass, the shaking as the two came together causing a tinkling not unlike that of cubed ice colliding in a summer drink.

She brought a footman's cloth back with her, and several moments were spent attempting to get the water into his mouth and down his throat, neither drowning him nor flooding his shirtfront in the process. And certainly not requiring him to do much in the way of moving or altering his position.

With that accomplished, he continued. "I do not say that you can find her. It is likely too much to hope for. She has taken it into her head to embark upon something singularly dangerous," he warned, "I cannot impress this upon you too greatly." He took a breath. No going back once he'd begun. "There is a hotel on Sark, the Dixcart. You must ask - for the man present the night Lady Marion was shot."

"How shall I get to Sark? To this hotel?" she asked, bewildered, her face puckering with worry. "It is Alderney to which my father has ordered me."

Had they been up for it, his eyes would likely have rolled with a degree of impatience, or at least fluttered. As it was, patience was among the only things at present he had to spare. "The Kommandant will surely send you home after your dinner - alone, as he will most likely remain at his manor and prepare for the late evening parties to come. _You_ must fall ill when you are far enough away from Alderney - so that your escort will not simply return you there - and close enough that he might change his course to land on Sark. At the Dixcart, a Dr. Battley will be called to attend on you. When he arrives, tell him you must give a message to Alex La Salle. Now say it back to me."

"Sark, the Dixcart, Dr. Battley, a message for Alex La Salle."

"Good girl," he closed his eyes and risked a shallow nod of his head. Eyes still closed, he continued. "Do not mention Marion by name to anyone. _Anyone_. Someone will come to see you - "

"The man from the night of the shooting?"

"Possibly."

"Is he Alex La Salle?"

"No." He opened his eyes. "I cannot tell you his name."

She was looking at him intently, but did not protest his withholding from her.

"When the person arrives," he continued, "say, '_Pennsylvania six, five-thousand_'. Tell them why I am not there myself. Tell them they must find Lady Marion. Tell them everything's gone pear-shaped."

Eleri mused on the code word he had given her, tried it on her tongue several times, consistently stumbling over the peculiar word 'Pennsylvania'.

Allen had let his eyes squint-up shut once he finished with his instructions. His grip on her hand loosened somewhat. His breathing, which had turned agitated as he had spoken returned to a more normal rhythm.

"Why can you not go yourself? Pass these things on?" Eleri asked, a frown folding upon her brow.

Perhaps it seemed a reasonable question - he had no mirror to see how capable of doing such he may or may not have looked.

"No, Hen," he assured her, his speech losing its former profluence. "I cannot. I could not stand long enough to find the door to this room, and may be I will not have it in me to live through this night." He let one eye wince. "A man knows when he's beat, and I'm not too proud to say it: bodily, I'm beat. Should I attempt to chase after her now it will be two rescues needing affected - not just the one."

He felt her bring the back of his hand (still in hers) up to her cheek. "I'm afraid," she told him.

And for a minute he thought she referred to the referenced possibly that he would not live to see the dawn, but before he could attempt to comfort her on that count, she clarified.

"What if I'm not able to do it? What if something goes wrong? I do not know if I am the kind of girl who can do such a thing."

It was an infrequent moment of publicly acknowledged self-doubt for her.

"Naw," he assured her (though his voice had grown thready), reminding himself not to couple the gesture of shaking his head with the words spoken. "You're just the very right sort. Who can say no to you, Ellie? You're strong inside, and willful - who more so than you? And what's more, when islanders look at you they see a Kommandant's daughter. They'll deny you nothing. There is no way you can fail," he told her, though he was not at all certain in that moment that he believed it himself. He thought he ought affect a smile as a capper to his pep talk, but thinking he might only (in the degree of pain he was in) render it gruesomely, he changed his mind, and hoped sincerity of facial expression might win the day.

He heard Eleri take in a very deep breath before rising from beside him.

"There is a footman just outside the door," she said, "should you call for him. Herr Geis has encouraged my father to send for Ginny Glasson to look in on you if she is not too occupied with Joss Tyr," she stalled a moment at this statement, recalling that they both knew that the psychic at present suffered from no real malady. "I will stop back once I am dressed, and you may quiz me on what I recall of what you have said."

She had replaced his hand upon his chest, and though she offered no physical comfort, no pats or caresses to him as she walked away, once at the door she stopped and turned back. "Don't die," she told him - as though he had a say in such matters. "Things here would be simply awful without you."

_Well, it was sound advice_, he thought, _not dying_. Certainly he would take it under advisement. He resumed the effortless task of lying immobile upon the chaise, '_Pennsylvania six, five-thousand_' pounding on like an endless drum solo in his head.

* * *

**SARK - Beach at Heather's-Edge Heath - Stoker/Legg rendezvous point -** Marion was standing, still somewhat stunned by her last-moment exchange with Robin's man, Roger Stoker.

The night was for the most part clear, with only the occasional cloud coming between the moon and the Sarkese landscape. To her back lay the ancient stone circle that in better days had won this particular spot its appeal to off-islanders. To the South, the almost unseeable, un-navigable cove and the cavern offshoot that currently sheltered the launch she had stolen from Allen Dale.

It had been an awkward rendezvous with Stoker and Royston. They had been expecting her to be squired into their company by Allen, after all. Expected her to be ready to travel with them. And while Stoker seemed to recover from the shock that she was not going, but rather sending Carter, quickly enough (Royston only looking rather chary at such last-moment changes in plan), there was still something about him that seemed to treat her...with a bit too much - an odd word for it, but there you had it - enthusiasm.

It was not as if they had known one another at home. She was not even certain she had ever been introduced to him. Yet she felt his eyes follow her, settle on her with a sort of curiosity for the length of time they had needed to wait before getting the sub's return boat loaded with the men and out into the water.

Then again, maybe not quite curiosity. Possibly, pride (though it made little sense to her to bequeath such a feeling onto a total stranger).

It had been paramount that they kept any speech between the four of them to a minimum, as both the night air and the water would carry sound much more dangerously than during daylight hours. Even so, he had taken the chance to assure her that he would, 'be certain to let her brother know she was well.'

Royston had shortly returned to where they three were huddled as he had positioned himself where he might sight and respond to the sub's signaling that it had surfaced and was ready to retrieve them. He gave a terse nod, not risking his coarse (and usually hearty) voice in the betraying air.

She had shoved - without showing it to him or offering explanation - the photograph of young Seth into one of Thomas Carter's many uniform pockets. She brought her mouth up as close to his ear as possible and instructed him. "See when you arrive that my brother receives this." She felt the friction of his now closely shaved sideburn against her face as he nodded in agreement. A small enough task to perform in exchange for a ride home. For escape.

She knew the picture, once in Clem's hands, would need no further explanation. Just as she knew it was a piece of evidence, of such private evidence, that she would never have been able to appoint Roger Stoker to deliver it. No matter how he seemed to regard her in this moment.

All three brought their eyes to bear on Stoker, who then announced - in the quietest tones possible, "Bet it or regret it, Hoss," - as his way of saying it was time to launch the boat and climb aboard.

Even as her mind reeled at hearing the impossibly familiar line, she waded into the shallows to hold the prow of the boat (more umiak than Channel-suited vessel), so that the others might get in more easily. As it was Stoker who settled himself nearest her, she took the chance, knowing that if she didn't, she'd wonder about his knowing such a peculiar turn of phrase indefinitely.

"Why did you say that?" she asked, her voice lowered but intense. "Just now, about betting?"

The clouds were well clear of the moon, and when he smiled she saw the fond expression in both the whites of his eyes and his parted teeth. "Just something an unsuccessful riverboat gambler used to say to me," he told her, shrugging it off, and her heart nearly stopped at the thought of Freddy somewhere on the Continent. Somewhere this MI-6 officer had fallen in with him.

Which was why, in her reverie, she had not immediately returned to the cluster of rock behind which they had originally been hiding as the boat pulled slowly but steadily out onto the Channel waters, raising with every hump, every rise and fall of the waves on the in-bound tide.

As the three men retreated into the distance, she thought she could see moonlight cut across the cheekbone of Thomas Carter as he rowed, the dark coloring on his blonde hair deadening the possibility of it also catching and reflecting any giveaway of lunar shine.

When she first heard the rumble, she assumed it was merely distant thunder, announcing that a storm would shortly be on its way. She strained her eyes out into the choppy waters before her, beyond the small boat of three men laboring at tiller and oar - still cautious of engaging the motor - and tried to see the surfaced sub.

But alas, Royston's eyes exceeded her own in their hawkishness here. She could see nothing, and only in faith could believe it there - that link to home, that certain escape - at all.

_Pop pop pop_! she heard, a sound she could not even place right away. She saw a man's form fall from the boat, into the troubled waters, and willed herself not to gasp. _Machine gun fire_. What she had taken for thunder, the engine of a Jerry patrol - no, multiple Jerry patrol boats, converging with startling efficiency on this very spot.

Recognizing what was happening, she sprinted back to the cluster of rocks just before those patrols turned their high-powered searchlights to shore.

She panted with both exertion and fear as she looked out through a fortuitous crack in the stone. The searchlights gave the Jerries a better view of their quarry, but also gave her the same advantage. They were too far out for her to see who had fallen into the sea, but not yet close enough to depend fully upon the sub and what guns it might have to defend the small boat making its way toward them.

No longer worried about noise, nor intent on stealth, one of the two remaining men engaged the motor, and the boat (its load lighter, minus one) roared to life, racing out toward the deeper water and the protection of the sub, under heavy fire and pursuit by the Jerries.

Naturally, she wanted to see it through to the end, to know whether they would reach freedom, but her mind told her she'd best be running the short (but open-to-being-seen) section of beach from the beach's rock cluster to the narrow path that had led them here, while the Jerries had their searchlights pointed in the opposite direction. The Lady Marion Nighten could not afford to be caught on this beach tonight.

She was just turning herself away from the crack when she heard it...the slow, cautious drag of a body across the loose shale that comprised the narrow beach.

The pain of memory shot through her only-just-healing arm, that recent gift from Joss Tyr, reminding her that she was carrying no weapon with which to defend herself. In trembling anticipation of being found, she froze in place, waiting to see how the next moments of her life would play out, regretting that she had not had a chance to tell Robin how and why she had thrown over his plan for one of her own, mourning that it did not appear at all definite that any of the three men she had only just aided and abetted and wished farewell would reach England.

There was a flurry of shale as the man rounded the rocks (him still flat to the ground) and joined her. His breathing was ragged in the extreme, and there was a deep smell of seawater upon him. As he did not rise, risking herself, she went down on her knees.

"Carter! Carter?" she hissed at him, now recognizing him, in the moonlight red streaking down from his hairline onto his face and neck. He was soaked to the very bone, and she could hear him gurgling somewhat, trying to expectorate what excess seawater he had taken on in his desperate swim back to shore.

"Where are you hit?" she asked, her hands searching through his hair, trying to find the wound producing the blood. "Where are you hit?"

"Not," he was able to gulp after several long moments, and she realized that what she had mistaken for blood was only the unreliable hair dye of his that had an inconvenient habit of rinsing out in rain or water. Even now she saw where it had stained the collar and back of his RAF jacket.

"Have they gotten away?" she asked, hoping he had managed a better view of it than had she.

"Look and see," he encouraged her, himself interested in little but his own narrow escape from Jerry fire.

She stood, and did so. "The boat, I think, has arrived. The sub's guns are holding the patrols at bay. Why do they not dive?" she asked, frustrated with the submarine's inaction. "Why?"

When she turned back around, Carter had pulled himself up to standing. Well, leaning, more like, against one of the largest stones. "We must leave here, immediately," he told her, no hint of casual anywhere in his voice.

"Yes," she agreed. "And we must get you home."

He gave her a rather dubious look.

"No," she would have none of it. "The plan has not changed. Only the method of conveyance. I have Allen's boat. Not far from here. Tell me what you need, and I will do it."

His visible doubt somewhat lessened at her mention of a vehicle, he followed her off the beach, back to the track they had hiked to arrive at the Heath. Due to his swimming exertion, he necessarily followed several steps behind her brisk, determined pace. Beyond them, out upon the waters, the Jerry patrols still circled, looking for what they might find on the now empty surface of the Channel.

"Can you get me to an airfield?" Thomas Carter finally asked, when they had arrived at the cove that held Dale's launch.

"I know of one," Marion confessed, it requiring effort for her to do so in an even tone of voice. "If you do not mind traveling to Alderney." Knowing something of his prior time spent there, she searched his face - as best she could - in the darkness.

"We had best collect the uniform I buried, if we can re-locate the cave in which we hid. On Alderney - even out upon the waters tonight - such a bluff could only prove useful," he calculated.

_Relocate the cave_, she thought to herself, as she took the launch's wheel. Yes, that she could do. Certainly her time spent there had not been something she had been able to forget.

She threw a glance in Carter's direction, unable to read anything from the side of his face (all that she could see). _What were those memories like for him?_ He spoke of them casually enough just now. _Was it only a cave to him? One of a thousand other places he had been - in which he had hidden?_

She shook the disturbing canyon of emotion and emotionlessness that both separated and yet bonded them out of her mind, as she had (because there was nothing else to do with it) the uncertain fate of the two other men. As she had the notion that Freddy had not managed to avoid the war, but was, most obviously, now out fighting it. And as she had shaken the tire iron blow to the man who usually piloted this vessel out of her mind as well.

There was room only in her mind for navigating by moonlight. For outrunning or outsmarting any further Jerry patrols. First, the cave of her kidnapping. Then, Alderney, the island of death.

The island of death - _with_ an airfield.

**...TBC...**

* * *

**A/N:** To anyone still awaiting responses: All but non-existent internet connection since last update. _Apologies_.


	48. Snapped

**SARK - Below waters, rapidly retreating from the shoreline -** Roger Stoker - Londoner, obedient subject of His Majesty, son, brother, husband, father, brother-in-law, son-in-law, friend and soldier - knew he was dying, had in this war witnessed Death come firsthand for so many other men. Knew his time had come and knew Legg saw it as well. The large Navy man had little or no capacity where hiding his true thoughts and emotions were concerned. Though in his straightforward line of work he had hardly needed to cultivate such.

They had barely gotten to the just-peeking-above-the-waterline railings, gotten through to the sealed chamber at the sub's top before the submersible began its dive; sharply, abruptly (to only recently-taken-on passengers), frustrating the Jerry patrols figure-eight-ing atop the waves (and hopefully setting in to outrunning whatever U-boat firepower the enemy might send after them once they were well below).

Legg had maneuvered to get him awkwardly hitched up against his seated self, awaiting the arrival of a medic. Weirdly, Stoker found himself in some approximation of the other man's embrace. His mind registered that he was not sure, beyond the rare handclasp, if they two had ever before touched. The fallout of war (such as in this occasion of unprecedented masculine intimacy) never failed to fascinate him.

"'This Oxley?" Legg questioned him with some urgency regarding the other man dragged onboard - as Roger had understood, his own war-educated eyes telling him Stoker's were not long to hold the light, and that he must learn what information he could before that came to pass.

"No. Wouldn't come," Roger answered, struggling to find his voice, the pain of the Jerry ammo sunk into him dimming somewhat as his spirit worked to float further and further away from it. "Richard...Royston," he introduced his now lifeless friend, his face contorting at the finality of what he must say about this friend, whom it was now too late to rescue or save.

He shifted his head to see up into Legg's face, "leave him to the Sea - once you are in safe, English waters. It is what he would have wanted. He was never one for too long spent on land. Promise," he entreated. "Do not let HQ, nor his sorry excuse for a Mrs. have their way - give him into the arms of his chosen mistress."

"Right, that," Legg agreed, a strong nod to his head with the natural understanding of a fellow seafaring man. "With a coin in his very pocket for Davy Jones."

"With _my_ letter," Roger stumbled on, anything not Legg's face rapidly losing focus, "deliver also this one in my coat. It is meant for a Louise La Salle, refugee from these islands - a cleric's wife. I have given my word that it will find its way to her."

"Louise La Salle," Legg obediently repeated the name. "But have you any news for us?" he queried Stoker on the findings of his one-man invasion of the island. "Any information?"

"Unit 1192 is complete, save one." He recalled Royston's body lying next to him. "No, save _two_." The face of Thomas Carter flashed into the middle ground before him. "A downed airman was with us - he fell...from the boat. Don't know..."

"An airman?" Legg asked with curiosity. "One of our boys?"

"Eagle Squadron," Stoker mumbled, his chin having fallen into his chest, as though it had taken on more weight than his neck could support, and then seemed to forget what they were speaking about. "It doesn't hurt, you know," he tried to assure Legg. "It doesn't - it's not like -" he then lost even this train of thought. "Don't know who gave us up." His eyes fluttered and something seemed momentarily to rouse him. "Are we safe, then? Are we clear and away? Nearly home?"

Legg, feeling no regret at lying to a soon-to-be-dead man, nodded his head in 'yes'.

Tears welled in the corners of Stoker's eyes, but not for the present pain he endured. "It is only that you would not believe how beautiful it was there -" he tried to explain. "...like Paradise. Like a parson's anticipated eternal reward, wot, Old Man." His lips peeled back in a tooth-revealing smile. "To be understood, that is the thing, isn't it? I hope she...Evelyn -"

He gasped, and whether it was that he recalled that all he meant to say to his wife and young sons was written down in a letter Legg would faithfully deliver, or simply that he lost all sense of where he was - a submerged weapon of war, the pastoral island of Sark, or at the gates of Paradise itself - he spoke no more.

Shortly, his chest fell one final time, just as the medic was arriving, scrambling up the ship's ladder to examine him, and Naval Commander Ron Legg (as had the man's spirit before him) surrendered his hold on Roger Stoker's mortal coil, of necessity ready to radio news of his comrade-in-arms' passing. But not before he deliberately slipped his hand into the dead man's coat and withdrew the letter (the second now of two) Stoker had tasked him with delivering.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Heindl Cottage -** "You should not have done it," Mitch Bonchurch (here, known as Miller) would come out of his pain long enough to hear as a voice periodically repeated it, the threat of tears washing over the voice causing something within him to register that he knew it, and its speaker, well.

But it was not his mother's voice. No, not Lady Sophie's.

"He was not going to hurt me, of course. I tried to tell you -" here the voice increased in its pleading. "Did you not see me shake my head, to show you it was all a ruse? A trick? A nasty game he was playing?"

He thought he heard the arrival of the tears now, only, he could not be certain they (and the sounds that accompanied them) were not his own.

"And what am I to do? _I_ know of no one to tell, to contact. Faces, yes, I have seen _faces_. Faces of men dead years ago, walking like spirits reanimated. Walking about the island, accepting the gift of boats, the love of a Lady. But do I know where these men shelter? No."

He felt a pulling at him.

"You must wake, _Chere_," the voice urged him. "You must tell me what to do - how to warn these men of what is coming! Ah, _mon chere, mon Mitch - mon coeur_! Speak words to me!"

And he felt a kiss - not at all motherly in nature - and he felt the wetness of another's tears fall upon his cheek, and marveled that in his pain - his despair, his disconnect - he could feel so gentle, so weightless, a sensation.

But still, even for this voice, he could not pull himself out of the slippery, uncertain depths of wrenching anguish that claimed his lower half.

* * *

**ALDERNEY - German-built airfield -** "And what if you cannot get free of this island to return in time to host your Nightwatch?" Thomas Carter had inquired earlier in their covert travels.

"I have made plans for such a contingency," Marion had assured him without truly telling him anything, still at knowing - as did they both - the less any single person knew about the Nightwatch, about Robin and the unit, about Mitch having been located...the better.

"Another schooled mimic, then," he had concluded aloud, nodding his head, "roaming these small islands. What unexpected good fortune," he had declared, more good-humoredly than satirically.

"Hardly," she had let an edge of scorn creep into her revelation regarding the unnamed Joss Tyr, "'twas same that shot me clear through." She attempted to flex a muscle in her injured shoulder, to gauge its present level of pain. "And same to whom Mr. Thornton pointlessly lost his life."

"_Hmm_," Carter had offered in reflection in the last moments they were still out upon the water and not yet moored, hidden from view on an Alderney beachhead. "Then I am surprised 'twas not toward same you leveled said tire iron."

Marion had winced slightly at the unpleasant dig, but pleased with the spot she had found to tie Dale's launch, she elaborated, reminding Carter, "I am not in the habit, you may well recall, of viciously attacking the misinformed, nor killing the useful."

There was no reply given to this (nor none expected) as they had had to hurry, silently onto land, giving up the speedy vessel in the final leg of their journey to the airstrip she had promised to locate for him.

Priorly they had stopped, as suggested, at the sea cave and retrieved the Jerry uniform Carter had stolen upon her kidnapping. It suffered from being plentifully caked with mud - consequent of its burial - but thankfully in the night through which they traveled its condition was unlikely to be noticed.

Although the addition of the uniform gave them a degree of credibility (as did what he assured her was his more-than-sufficient knowledge of the German tongue), her presence - and the time of night and lack of transportation by which they journeyed - likely equaled out their liability.

* * *

Marion had only on several occasions been brought 'round to this airfield, which had not existed prior to the Germans' arrival on Alderney, but she proved adept enough at leading them toward it. It had been designed and built - conceived - as a base for the bombing of Britain, and for what _der Fuehrer_ expected to be the coming onslaught of invasion, the Channel Islands serving as the starting point for his planned ultimate takeover of England's people.

Although generally the field was far from quiet in the dark hours, it seemed they had managed to sneak in during a lull in activity. In the distance they could hear the sounds of only occasional planes launched and landed. Perhaps there was to be no large assault this night, or perhaps tonight's bombing runs were to be carried out by pilots based elsewhere - the French mainland, perhaps.

Like young lovers caught out past their curfew, they ran when they could from shadow to shadow, tried as one to control their ragged breath when they stopped to regroup. At one such interval she asked him quietly if these planes would suffice. If he could fly them.

She hoped they would not have to waste further time in searching out others.

Looking as though he could make the trip - and successfully navigate if only given a paper airplane in which to do so - Carter gave her a hearty (if silent) affirmative. "If I can but get airborne and away from here, avoiding being shot down by Jerries will be the least of my worries," he confessed to her. "It's our boys who'll have it out for me, flying alone into British-controlled skies in an unmistakeable enemy fighter."

At her look of concern, he spoke on, elaborating in an effort to quieten her doubts. "I do know a code here, a secret channel there, that, if they have not been changed, should prove no small help in the matter."

Marion put on what she hoped he could see (in the darkness) was an optimistic smile at this.

It was not long before they were standing in the shadows of a modest-sized fighter plane, not so good looking as his beloved Spitfire, and doubtful to have the same agility when in flight, but appearing more than adequate to carry him home. He gave a quickly whispered primer to her on what he needed her to carry out to give him his start, and climbed the truncated ladder toward the pilot's seat.

She did not waste time informing him that she had some years ago - in her grief, in the wake of Robin and the unit's 'accident' - studied and researched the length and breadth of plane flight (and plane crash), down to engine parts. Did not bother to speak up and tell him she knew exactly what needed to be done to get him up and away.

Upon the ladder, something he was not familiar with caused him to pause, and turn around. Instead of thanking Marion for what she was risking for him (which would have been eminently more sensible), he heard himself say, "Come with me, if you like. There's room for a second - and you are light enough at that."

This, Marion had not expected. It felt of a big shift to her - a shift within him. This man, beyond eager to leave this place, this man not given to risks that were not certain to pay out, this man that wanted escape and flight at any cost.

"What," she teased him, her voice a broad whisper so that he might hear it from where he perched above her, her own hand to the bottom of the ladder railings, "having another go at kidnapping me?"

Before he could answer her in kind, or indeed answer her at all, she leapt to doing the things he had instructed her, and as his engine caught and choked into full-life, she saw him look down one last time (as if - could he have done - he might have had one final thing to say to her), before sliding the glass dome forward over his head and giving her a thumbs-up, his blonde hair - revealed as a consequence of his earlier frantic swim back to shore - in full-view in the moonlight, the streaking, blood-like stain of the washed-away hair dye covered up by the Nazi uniform coat he wore.

Just as at the seashore prior, Marion found herself loathe to immediately jump back into full-hiding, so desperate she was to see him airborne, to assure herself he was bound away from here. That in her overthrowing of Robin's earlier plan she had gotten at least one thing right.

The fighter rolled forward once she had pulled its blocks, the engines buzzed with their particular, pitched whine. Carter took one pass by her, circling so that he might face the outbound direction on the airstrip.

It was just as he was coming about for that second pass that she heard the unmistakable sound of jackboots - _many jackboots_ - behind her; of a large gun being capably and quickly assembled upon the hard concrete of the landing strip. As Carter wheeled by on his final pass before taking off, she saw in his face (clearly visible through the dome's glass) that he saw what was about to occur, but saw also that he was too committed - the fighter already near-airborne - to change course, or prevent it.

She twisted to run away (she knew not to where) from the airstrip and the arrived soldiers, thinking she might yet manage it, and found a powerful leather glove commandingly clamped upon her upper arm. The wrenching pain of such a grip closing on the place where she had so recently been shot not only halted her escape, it nearly dropped her flat to the ground.

She looked up over her shoulder to see Geis looking down at her, incredulity mingled with the outrage emblazoned upon his face, abundantly readable even in the dark. But his eyes did not stay on her. Without lessening his hold on her, he shot them quickly away to the fighter plane and the face of the man who was housed within its transparent dome.

_A ghost, a spectre_. Not flesh and blood, not bone and muscle - brain - needed to navigate instruments and manipulate the stick used in take-off and landing. _No_, what he saw and understood was an apparition that would haunt exclusively him.

And so it was only the dropping of the SS Lieutenant's jaw, the utter lack of air within his own lungs at the sight of the escaped (long thought so) Flight Commander Thomas Carter, 2265483236Z (_would he ever forget this man's number?_) - his special prisoner, a man whom not even _die maschine_ could break, a man that clearly held some position of deep importance in the life of Marion (husband? lover? co-conspirator?); a man who had stood in the way of his success both at his job and in his romantic life - piloting same that prevented him from immediately issuing the order for his men (and their large gun) to fire.

The RAF pilot's eyes raged back at the sight of Gisbonnhoffer. At the sight of Gisbonnhoffer's hands on the struggling-against-him Lady Marion. But even amidst his emotions - his honor - crying out for vengeance, for the man's death, Carter was skilled enough to know that there was no room to again turn the plane, to accurately aim its guns at the attachment of soldiers assembled behind his torturer and nemesis. In short, there was nothing that he could do but take to the skies and finish the task he and Marion had set out to accomplish. To turn back, to abandon the plane, would be to pointlessly sacrifice both himself and Marion to the control of the enemy. To the dangerous whim of this man.

"Go!" he could not hear Marion say, but he could read when she shouted it in the shape of her lips, could make out that it was screamed from the tension of the muscles that stood out, corded, in her usually smooth neck.

A year ago he would not have waited, sidetracked even by this - by his comrade (even a woman) in imminent danger - not been impeded for even the twinkling of an eye. Yet _this_ day Thomas Carter let the space of two heartbeats pass. Or perhaps it was Alex La Salle that did so. Even, possibly, Alexsei Igorovich. He could not take the time to ponder it. He pulled the stick toward him as any pilot would, as their instinct would tell them to do, such men who belonged in the sky.

It was several long minutes of dodging ack-ack from below (his and Marion's ruse seen-through by the Jerries more quickly than he would have expected) before he was able to level-off and set his mind to what he must navigate next: convincing the British he was not, in fact, the Jerry bomber and officer he was at-present disguised as being.

As for Marion Nighten, it was obvious to him she ought to have come along. But not as obvious as the fact that she was now utterly erased, removed from his sphere of influence. That he could no longer aid her in whatever troubles the night brought to her. That it would surely bring to her.

He thought on Oxley.

If there was anyone that might be trusted in the faithful keeping and protection of her, it was him. He mused on this, attempted to take relief in this, as long as he in good conscience could, before returning his mind to the daunting and potentially perilous hours ahead.

The night was clear, the immediate horizon empty, and the relative safety of English shores waited for him in the distance.

And he was flying.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Nightwatch Windmill -** Joss Tyr looked a sideways glance at the Nazi who had shortly ago put him into irons. One of Gisbonnhoffer's elite two. _Yes, he recognized him well enough_. The man, Thered, was no stranger to the Cabaret Alstroemeria.

Fortunate, though, that the landser proved thick enough not to recognize _him_. Of course, as with any time he stepped out-of-doors, he was still accoutered in some version of costume and makeup. Even if this particular disguise was meant to help him pass for your average islander.

It had been a bad break for him to be caught at the windmill, arriving in an attempt to do as the Lady Marion had asked him...proctor that night's broadcast. He had already been well down the rickety stairs when he saw that the place had been ransacked - the records now but shards scattered about upon the primitive flooring. He had proven easy enough to take into custody after that, his eyes repeatedly and uneasily going to the now-brown bloodstain at the base of the stair.

* * *

He did not know where they were transporting him at present - likely to their stronghold on Alderney. The journey itself ought to offer plenty of time to puzzle over how he wished to handle the incident; wait for Prinzer to step in (as he certainly would), and bamboozle him with a story? Try to talk his way out of it? Or simply see what damage he might affect, given the situation. His time - the prophecies' time - was growing short, the Voices told him.

At the least, he was glad Avia was back, returned to him...now in the safekeeping of Ginny. Gin would see to her, he felt confident. Whatever the night brought, whatever the Voices might portend, his Avia would lack for nothing.

* * *

**ALDERNEY - German-built airfield -** "Look at you!" Gisbonnhoffer shouted, though Carter and the stolen fighter and its clatter of engine was far enough away - up in the sky - now that there was no need to raise his voice to be easily heard. Sweat poured from his hairline, and within his leather gloves his hands had become slick and unreliable, causing his grip to tighten almost hysterically in order to hang on to both glove and Marion. "Standing here having broken into a high security facility, aiding an enemy - a prisoner's - escape!"

He delivered a strong shake of her by the grip upon her arm. His eyes felt as though someone had thrown a dose of salts into them. "At least you have the decency not to lie to me further - nor bat your lashes in distraction." He gulped for air, and gave a pause for effect, "_Nightwatch_." He gave another strong, teeth-rattling shake to her, so violent that with her own weight being off balance it pulled her from his hold and sent her down onto the concrete. Upon impact, her face showed him both that she was not accustomed to such treatment (which he knew), and that he had managed to render her in some degree of pain.

"I have all I need from you, Marion," he told her, ignoring both of his insights, as well as a flash-moment in which he nearly responded to them. "The windmill, your _records_, your transmitting equipment. There is no use denying it. A ring found an island away from where you swore you had been taken. An illegal spyglass for receiving coded messages from Sark - and who knows what else. Proof of illicit hoarding on the Barnsdale estate. And now this - _this_!"

He brought a hand to his head to try and stop it from reeling, ripped the glove away from it to bring his own clammy palm to his forehead's flesh. After all he had had to reconcile to himself in the past hours, the unimaginable sight of the airman's face had once again thrown it all out of the boxes he had only just tidily placed his understanding of what was going on into. _Thomas Carter, __here__, on the islands. Only now escaping. Thomas Carter, near enough to him in distance to be shot, Thomas Carter's story to be ended. And yet again, chance lost._

Gisbonnhoffer looked down to his feet, well aware of the collection of men behind him, awaiting his further order. "Marion of Nighten," he said to her through but a narrow slot between his at-wanting-to-clench teeth, at first his voice rough and unwilling to go on from the shock of seeing, of all things, the flier's face, "Lady of Barnsdale, lone noble aristocrat on the Island of Guernsey." He scoffed hard through his nose, his lopsided smirk stretching across his face. "And look at you now. You're just a common outlaw. House and lands lost, your title derisory, without authority. Do you think I don't laugh every time I go to sleep in a Barnsdale bed? In _your_ bed?"

Felled as she had been, at his feet, her scuffed cheek to the pavement, Marion realized she had good and well truly snapped, broken completely with the way she might have approached this situation in the past. She felt the tire iron from earlier in the night as surely as if her fist were still curled about it in those tense moments before she changed its potential into kinetic energy, before she connected it with the skull of Allan Dale, fully committing herself to whatever her decided-upon path might bring about. Now, knowing that she was done for, knowing that she no longer wished (or needed) to play at turning his head anymore, ready for the truth no matter what it might bring with it, and full-sick of denials, she put her hands to the gravel-on-concrete ground, pushing herself slowly to her feet as she spoke.

Her hair initially shielded her expression from him, but as she went on he was glad for it, glad not to see the truth and all its cruelty, in her face.

"Every moment," she told him, finding some degree of relish within it, "_Every_ moment that I was being your friend, I was betraying you."

His eyes locked onto hers, and he could neither see nor sense anything else of his surroundings. There was only Marion. Marion, a woman as different as he had long believed her to be as was one demon-possessed. At the sound and meaning of her words, horror washed over him, in short order morphing into hatred, and a desperate, increasingly frantic need to stopper her mouth.

Unaware (and uninterested) in this, Marion spoke on, as though she had experienced some sort of triumph that deserved eulogizing, "Every day that you grew more and more to love me, I was mocking you."

"You!" His voice was as abrupt as a pistol shot or launched flare. He leveled his arm, elbow extended, finger pointed in her direction, knowing she had fifteen or more sidearms trained upon her at present. "_Do not_ speak to me."

"What do _you_ know?" she continued to taunt him, finding a temporary relief in her discomfort as long as she spoke, "_this_ is who I am," she gave a ragged laugh that betrayed the pain he had put her in. "You are nothing to me."

"Gag the prisoner!" Gisbonnhoffer shouted wildly, feverishly, his voice losing its dependable (in such circumstances) monotone, unable and unwilling to hear what she was saying.

**...TBC...**


	49. Tattoo What tattoo

**SARK - the countryside -** To any observer it would have been hard to say which was at moving faster: Robin Oxley's mind, or his at-full-tilt feet.

* * *

**Outside **_**ReichKaptain**_**'s office -** Wills Reddy had arrived as soon as he could manage to the office site of Sark's _ReichKaptain_, initially ready to take over any necessary pleading (and possible bribing) in the cause of the immediate release of Iain Johnson. It had been on his way there, to the island's north, that Wills had paused for only the shortest stop-in at the Dixcart, wanting to check if Allen had yet arrived on-island, wishing to tell him of John's being apprehended, and conversely hoping to carry news to Robin that Marion had been safely landed and smuggled onto Sark, shortly (as per the plan) to find herself bound for Heather's-Edge Heath and home, courtesy Roger Stoker and his MI-6-sent sub.

But it was not the undercover Dale whom Wills found there, but rather Dr. Battley - in broadest whispers all but shaking Wills' arm off whilst telling him the Alderney Kommandant's daughter was on-island and entreating him (as her doctor) for an audience with Alex La Salle. Fraulein Vaiser, Battley had confided, was at present not at all well - but her condition had not left her so close to being in touch with Death and the spirit world that she should know the inconsequential names of the random cousins of unremarkable tenants on Sark. Much less leave her asking him to arrange it so that she might speak to them.

Her request (which bore some level of desperation) had left Battley himself - a man determined to steer clear of such subterfuge, of even hinted disobedience to the Germans and their Occupation Code - more than merely shaken.

With frustrated disgust, knowing he could not immediately change course for Little Sark (the in-hiding Thomas Carter/Alex La Salle) and the mines, and not certain the request was anything more than a trap (whether the girl making it knew it or not), Wills again set out with an even greater determination to carry the news to Oxley, his superior officer, and free Robin to pursue this new development in whatever way he determined best.

Wills' reception by his fellows once arrived at the site of Lamberg's offices was (of necessity) a quiet one. From some distance away he had located the outlines of Robin and Stephen sitting among the waiting benches settled onto the hard-packed earth along the outside wall of the _ReichKaptain_'s quarters, biding their time among the other islanders also waiting for an audience.

There had not been opportunity for much conversation - hushed greetings, mostly - before Robin asked, quite uneasily, if he had not seen or heard something of Allen. If Wills knew whether Allen had not yet landed back on the island.

Wills' mind was elsewhere, focusing on what he must try to relay to Robin about Fraulein Vaiser's appearance, and her interest in (and seeming knowledge of) Alex La Salle. Waiting until the others in line had re-adjusted their attention away from his arrival, Wills spoke. "Kommandant Vaiser's daughter has arrived unexpectedly at the Dixcart," he told them, holding his voice level and unremarkable in an effort to deflect any further attention from them - yet unable to shake the dramatic weight and inherent danger of the statement. "She is asking after Alex La Salle."

"What of Allen?" Robin asked, preoccupied, shaking his head as though to clear it. "What has he to say of this development?"

"Nothing," Wills answered, "directly, that is. Though she carries with her," his voice dropped into a lower, half-silent register, '_Pennsylvania six, five-thousand_', so says the Doctor."

"And what does the Doctor think?" Stephen asked, a concerned crease in his forehead, though he did not know Robin's code word by name.

"That she is hysterical, in the throes of a nervous episode," Wills answered out of the corner of his mouth, taking up a stray stone within his hands, his thumb searching out its smoothness to rub. "He was of half a mind to sedate her, though he may likely have desired that if only to slow what he saw as her dangerous demands."

"But no trace of Dale?" Robin again questioned, his eyes still to the horizon. So reliably had he not taken his gaze from it, Wills began to wonder if Oxley even knew to which of his men he presently spoke.

Trying to ignore what appeared to be Robin's growing-more-narrow-by-the-moment tunnel vision regarding Dale's whereabouts, Wills asked leave to stay and negotiate with Stephen regarding John's release, freeing Robin to handle whatever mischief might or might not be up at the Dixcart. And likewise get to the bottom of what had prevented Dale from reappearing on the island with Marion in tow.

"Good man," Robin had said at Wills' suggestion. He spoke no further on his immediate intent (bound for the Dixcart or elsewhere), and before Wills or Stephen could reply, he was free in the wind.

* * *

**the countryside -** Robin Oxley could not logically think what to do, what action to take - where to command his attention next. It was too late in the day - darkness fast creeping - to expect the warning signal of Le Moulin to do Marion any good at this point. It had been a stretch to think it might reach her and alert her in the first place, now that she was no longer living at Barnsdale.

He was left with no way to contact Marion across this distance. And Allen had not arrived back. Perhaps the undercover member of the unit had not arrived on Guernsey, either. Perhaps Marion - Robin felt the myriad possibilities of the word repeating in his head, quiet as a whisper, fraught as an epitaph. Perhaps..._perhaps_...

It suggested circumstances too many to number. Of a certain too many against which to craft reliable plans.

Quite suddenly he knew himself for afraid. That singular emotion with which he had had not much interaction since his mother's death and the days that followed it. He had been so young then, a boy. He was a man now, finding that the maturity of fear was far worse. As a child life had held so many things over which he had no control, no responsibility. Fear and uncertainty had lurked in varying degrees everywhere. Follow that with a bachelor's life and a larger world over which he had almost no control - and allowed himself to have even less responsibility - and fear had retreated so far into the shadows - into his depths - one could pretend it had ceased to exist. But now, here - when he found himself nothing if not powerless - now it chose to overtake him. Fear, and panic in the wake of it. He had no tool with which to manage it. No Marion with which to temper it, it being the loss of Marion from which it sprung - Marion and the babe she carried. _His child_. And with that thought, another flash of his mother, of the child that had died with her. And again, for him, a raw dousing of fear.

In agitation his hand found its way into his pockets, feeling about for his tinder box, the few matches (a black market luxury) he carried about. They were neither of them his treasured cigarette case, neither a physical reminder of Marion, but for a renewed nervous hand - for now - they would have to do.

* * *

**Outside ReichKaptain's office -** The sunset earlier that evening had been a dull-enough one. Early darkness crept up around those Sarkese still at waiting for their moment with the _ReichKaptain_. Stephen felt Wills tense quite suddenly next to him upon the bench, and then stand, stock-still, as though turned to stone.

"What is it?" Stephen stood beside him to ask, a hand to Wills' shoulder, his own senses unable to locate anything in his surroundings out-of-the-ordinary. As his companion spoke, Stephen's ear caught on something both hard and incredulous - choked up - in the other man's tone.

"There has not been nearly enough time for Robin to make it to the Dixcart, Stephen," Wills informed the blind man at his side, knowing the other man knew this fact far better than did even he.

He took a moment to turn his head back toward his friend - though it was hard enough to face himself away from the color that now bloomed dangerously, portentously upon the horizon. Upon turning toward Stephen's face he could still see the bright blaze in the distance reflecting in the former rector's unseeing eyes.

"He's set fire to Le Moulin," Wills announced, his voice awash in disbelief at such an unexpected and risky act. "The flames are of such a height they will likely be seen all the way to France." He felt a twinge in his eyes, as though he were close enough to the distant fire's heat that they were affected by it. It was for Marion Robin had risked them all thus. Not for Allen, nor for John. For Marion.

Wills could only hope that Robin was even now well away from the signal he had lit. Away and approaching the Dixcart, his mind re-aligned to the unit's troubles, and at what was needed to solve them. And yet he was too familiar with both Oxley (and his own self) to suspect otherwise. _Robin might carry on, might set himself back to performing an officer's duty - the tending of his men. He may well have, in this instance of insanity, gotten his consuming concern for Marion briefly out of his system. _

_But at what cost to the rest of them?_

* * *

"What has he done?" Wills asked no one in particular, expecting no answer, fearing that in a similar situation he would have done the same - risked everything (himself, others) to warn the woman he now knew he loved - to warn Djak, to do anything within his power to ensure her safety. With no thought to the detriment of unmasking the others, robbing them of their sheltering cover.

The islanders among whom Stephen and he had been waiting now began to raise a murmur; the occasional exclamation rang out in surprise. They had seen it, too - the burning windmill. The occurrence, though dramatic, could hold no particular significance for them - other than the inherent dread anything out-of-the-ordinary birthed on an island years into an Occupation. _Le Moulin burned, on a lightning-less night? What did it mean?_ they would wonder. _What consequences would it hold for them?_

"Pray for him, Wills," Stephen said, urgency in his instruction, his hand tightening its grip upon the other man's shoulder and upon his own stick. "For John, for Marion - pray. Pray for us all."

* * *

**ALDERNEY - Treeton Camp -** It was not a lengthy trip from the airfield to the Treeton Camp and Geis' office there, Marion knew from experience. But she was not taken to his office. No, she had been immediately sequestered here, within the interrogation hut, in one of its holding rooms.

Some amount of time (she could not well judge it) had passed before Geis again joined her. By now her gag had been removed, and when he entered she asked the sole question that she felt hanging heavily in the air between them. "Are you going to kill me, then?" Pretty well convinced she knew the answer, her eyes hardened a bit about the edges, but were devoid of wary uncertainty.

At her straightforward inquiry, his eyebrow flicked up. "There was a time," Geis answered her, his voice controlled, rational, almost (for him) chatty, "in which I would have said, 'no. I cannot kill you. You - and the memory of your sorry excuse for a father - I have been told, are too valuable as propaganda tools at present.'" He gave a smile, all traces of his coming-on hysteria at the airstrip gone. This was his turf, now. Had he not felt so supercharged with unmasking Marion (having finally sussed her out) - with capturing the Nightwatch - he would have felt relaxed. "Naturally that would have been as tools which could be wielded by the Reich. That - " his smile slid into a smirk, "I think all involved realize - _that_ time has passed."

His voice dropped an octave in pitch, but retained its volume, retained its command. "NOW I will not kill you because you have become - or rather, you have the potential to become - both as Lady Marion _and_ as the unmasked Nightwatch - a propaganda tool which might be effectively wielded by the opposition on these islands, by those who oppose the Reich." He gave his head a light shake. "And we must not have that."

Without asking permission, another man entered the room, and took his place at the lone table, toward which she was faced. She recognized him as the Kommandant's particular lackey, _Underlieutenant_ Diefortner.

Unusually, Geis did not seem to visibly bristle as he always did when the man was in his presence. Instead, "See that she is stripped of her clothing," he threw the order over his shoulder to the man as _he_ moved to depart. "Fine knickers and all."

He did not stay to oversee, nor did he take so much as a fraction of a moment to look at her and relish the shock she could not contain at such an unexpected command, bleeding onto her face.

* * *

When Gisbonnhoffer reached the open doorway he paused a moment, taking his gloves from his belt and pulling them on before reaching for the handle to close it.

The skin of his palms was dry now, his demeanor unagitated. He was committed to what was to come next.

His tone was that of a drawing room discussion. "Do you know why I went to war, Marion?" he asked her, again his voice detached, instructive - his eyes to the space beyond the room, his back to her. "To recover the Sudetenland. To rescue our stolen lands. That which belonged to us. To see my country whole again." He stopped short of rhetorically adding, 'is there not honor in that?'

Her reply was as caustic as the slaked lime employed at Treeton to speed the breakdown of the lifeless bodies of prisoners. "What do you want, _Geis_," she let her voice sit upon his first name, the name he had not so long ago begged her to call him, "to be lord of the dance?" It was now her turn to scoff. "War. There will always be war, be men willing to go to war, to make war - for whatever reason - as long as people like you revel in their own ignorant bigotry!"

Without granting her a reply, willing himself not to register any response to her demeaning of him, he spoke directly to Ellingheim, standing at attention just beyond the doorway. "Bring in the girl," Gisbonnhoffer coolly instructed the First Landser, and himself exited.

* * *

**GUERNSEY - Barnsdale Estate - suite of the former Lady Nighten -** "Brilliant!" whispered Allen Dale to himself as the vertigo continued to overcome him and any attempts to move, despite the fact he remained the embodiment of stillness, prone upon the fainting couch.

He did not care for lying about with his eyes closed, no matter the pain opening them caused. Closed eyes when he was not asleep felt too much of being blind, too much of the past. Of fears he had never overcome, only managed to subvert with the miraculous regaining of his sight.

But too long spent flat on his back with heavy lids, and sleep _would_ come - whether he was ready for dreams or not.

* * *

He was too wet to be merely sweating. All around him there was far more shouting and disarray than would ever be allowed of the staff by Barnsdale's Mr. Clun. "We're hulled!" Mitch cried at the top of his lungs while Ox tried to get the Navigation Officer to focus long enough to tell him where the nearest landfall might be - whether they would be turning 'round to re-make for the French coast they had only so recently departed.

That was when he smelled the brine of fishing nets in the vessel's bottom, nets the unit had not taken time to remove in their hurried stealing of it. It was then he knew he was no longer at Barnsdale, that his mind had spirited him elsewhere. At John's urging, he and Royston worked to bail at top speed and attempt to keep them afloat long enough to land upon Channel Island shores - shores that Robin was reasonably sure Mitch, in his manic-state, had agreed they might actually be able to reach.

He heard the shot only just before he smelled its result; Royston went down, struck not by the enemy fire, but struck-through with a large splinter of their wooden boat the enemy fire had split off.

The night was moonless, and they were trapped in a desperate race they could not afford to lose with a lone Jerry patrol. Lone for now, but certain to welcome reinforcements at any moment.

It seemed no more than seconds later when he and John were tossing Royston overboard, into the water, soon themselves to follow. John first, and then...then he froze.

He had never known any particular fear of water or the ocean before. Not that he had had much experience with it - or swimming of any kind prior to their training, but certainly he had never feared it. He had swiftly become more than competent at the new skill. In fact, among the unit only Robin could outpace him when it came to laps at the base's pool.

Frozen, he felt the stickiness of Royston's blood where it had smeared upon his clothing, the dangerous, near-final listing of the hulled boat. He could only just make out the whites of John's eyes below him in the water, hear the sounds of Royston's agony at his wound being submerged in the Channel's salt.

What he could not see was any outline of the distant shore toward which they were meant to tow Royston. Toward which they were expected to swim. Black was the sea, black the shore; like jumping into one unseeable abyss, hoping to navigate towards another. Giving oneself over to sightlessness. To enveloping darkness.

He could not do it.

He heard Wills swearing at Robin nearby the wheelhouse, declaring him a fool for trying to continue piloting the now-limping-in-the-water boat any closer to shore. John's grunts rose up from over the side as he attempted to maneuver Royston on his own. And amidst all this all _he_ could do was stand, awash in his own cowardice.

"We're not the bloody _Hesperus_, man," he heard Mitch's familiar voice hiss into his ear, followed by a surprisingly powerful shoulder being pitched into his back, knocking him from the deck and into the drink below, just before another enemy onslaught.

The coolness of the water, the engulfing sensation of it - despite his misgivings - brought animation back to his limbs, purpose to his movements. Shortly he had his share of Royston, and a belief borne of desperation that they _would_ make it to landfall. His brain purposelessly brought up the fact that he did not even know the proper name of the island towards which the six of them strove.

Yet, for all he was worth, Allen Dale swam.

* * *

**ALDERNEY - Treeton Camp -** A dark-haired young woman was brought in, around about Marion's height and build, clearly one of the prisoners held here. Her eyes and posture showed that she had been here long enough to do as she was bidden without even so much as a spark of curiosity as to why - or as to what it might involve. When she was told to strip and swap her every garment with Marion, she did so, not even displaying a hungry interest in the clean, far-less-worn garments - including socks and underpinning - that she was being given and told to wear.

She spoke not a word, and once the exchange was done was taken from the room, not to appear again.

* * *

A soldier Marion did not recognize came in from without and spoke into the Underlieutenant's ear.

They exchanged hushed words she could not overhear, and the man grumbled something in reply, before taking Diefortner's place at the table, opening a case about the size of a typewriter and beginning to examine and review its peculiar, semi-mechanical contents.

* * *

**Outside Treeton Interrogation Hut -** "There has been an unexpected glitch, Sir," Diefortner told Gisbonnhoffer when he located him.

"I cannot think what," the lieutenant replied in cold assurance, displaying a level of irritation at Diefortner's inconvenient declaration. "_First Landser_ Ellingheim has done an above-average job of finding in the girl a more than convincing look-alike for our prisoner."

"That may well be so," Diefortner readily agreed, "the hair color and body type are certainly very alike. However," and at this Geis knew the other man - though without his ubiquitous binder and pad for the night - was about to speak as though he were even now consulting it, "it would appear the girl initially arrived at Treeton under highly irregular circumstances. Her paperwork is vague, but we have discovered that she was brought here as the particular favorite of one of Herr Kommandant's more privileged officers. This favoritism accounts for her hair having escaped being shorn upon her arrival. Fortunate in helping match her looks to Lady Marion, but..."

"Brought from where?" Gisbonnhoffer asked, though without true curiosity, "And with the Kommandant's consent?"

"No, not with official consent. Certainly none of the papers show it as such." Diefortner knew Vaiser to be far too clever to allow such a paper trail to exist on matters of sketchy import, such as the transport and billeting of specific female prisoners by soldiers (even officers) who had selected them as particular favorites. "She was transferred here - highly unusually - from the Auschwitz camp, where he had been serving prior."

"I see," Gisbonnhoffer agreed to the impediment Diefortner presented. "I care little for thumbing my nose at another officer's illicit whore, you may as well know. But the Auschwitz camp - this does present an obstacle in the fact that she would be marked."

"Quite right, Sir," Diefortner worked to make it seem as though the Lieutenant had come to this conclusion entirely on his own, "All those interned after '41 in the Auschwitz camp have been - efficiently - tattooed and numbered."

"It is quite possible his transferring her here saved her life," Gisbonnhoffer added quietly, to himself. "Well, fix it, man," he encouraged Diefortner. "Remove the evidence, and we shall proceed."

* * *

**Interrogation Hut -** Geis had returned to the room. She had been left standing before the table, as if on trial by tribunal. In her own clothes no longer, the girl's slight, worn and fraying frock and smock were neither too large, nor too small for her. She had lost her knickers, though, and the girl had neither those nor socks to compensate her. The shoes were worn through the sole in places, caked with mud, and easily three-quarters of a size too small for her feet.

But none of these issues of wear compared to the smell, the fact that these garments had not been washed in recent memory. Sitting against her skin now they awoke an immediate desire to scratch away at every spot where they came into contact with her.

It was not long before _Underlieutenant_ Diefortner returned. He carried something odd with him in his hand, which she saw was dripping. In the stark lighting she at first thought (for reasons she could not understand) that he held a cutlet of fresh liver - still bloodied.

He took whatever it was and laid it upon the table nearby the open case, beckoning in three guards who force-walked her over to a chair into which she was belted hand and foot. From this angle she could better see both the case's interior, and the hunk of not-liver. Though she had not seen its particular like before (and certainly never up-close) she could now discern that what she was looking at was a strip of freshly-cut flesh, displaying a series of numbers somehow showing - looking quite permanent - upon the skin. _A tattoo_.

From the case upon the table, Diefortner withdrew an implement that looked something of what she might have found in the office of her London dentist, and turned her own strapped-down arm - against its will - to its underside.

The pain was immediate upon (what she could only suppose was) the needle piercing her flesh. She willed herself not to cry out. Willed herself to study instead the cut skin lying on the table in front of him from which he meticulously copied the numbers. How much worse had that action - the carving of that pound of flesh - hurt the person (she assumed, the girl) who had endured it?

She came back into herself only to realize she had ceased breathing from the ongoing pain.

_Breathe_, she told herself, _breathe you ninny. This is not the moment to break, not the moment to pass out in the face of your enemies_.

She thought of Thomas Carter in the sky - _free_. She wished she had asked him specifically how long his voyage home might take. She thought of Stoker and Royston and the other men on the sub, also going home. Hoped to herself the two escapees had gotten on board safely despite the hail of gunfire, were even now being carried back to England.

She breathed. Diefortner completed his task upon her arm. The pain continued, but more manageably so.

She heard Geis' step behind her before he spoke. "You are now Reich prisoner Magda Blenheim," he said to her back. "Memorize the numbers upon your arm - from now on you will be known by them."

_So that was his plan_. "No," she told him, ice in the tone of her disagreement. "I was born the Lady Marion Nighten, daughter of Sir Edward, Lord Nighten - loyal to the Crown - and Lady Miranda Nighten of Lincoln Greene. My father sat in the House of Lords. Our family's distinguished history - our service to England - goes back to the twelfth century and the reign of Richard the Lionhearted. In addition to our country seat at Lincoln Greene we keep homes in Mayfair, and our estate upon the Channel Island of Guernsey." She could not see him, did not face him now, but that fact did not keep her eyes from flaming in outrage, though they had no face upon which to settle. "Along with my father, I crafted and wrote a monograph defending the mistreatment of Jews and others seen as inferior to the twisted German mind. Shortly after the Occupation began in '40, _I_ became the Nightwatch, a voice for freedom and resistance of oppression. _Despite_ having to entertain your repellent courtship and pursuit, in the midst of all this I found and married a man that loves me, and that I love. I have saved people from your kind, and lost others to it. Through my own actions I brought about both the original, and this night's current, escape of Flight Commander Thomas Carter, stranded on these islands for months, deep in hiding. I rendezvoused with a British sub off the coast and assisted in the return of not one, but two British agents to MI-6 where the stories they will tell will do nothing but damage your cause." She gave a short, stuttering laugh. "_You_? You do not know who I am. And I will not tell you my name now," she referenced the name and title she had received upon wedding Robin, "I will not give you even that inch of power over me." A smile of challenge crept onto her face.

But she found he would not rise to the challenge. "Given or not, I no longer need your complicity, 875692," he used only her numerals to address her. "And whether Lady Marion Nighten wed the eyes in this photograph - " He pulled out the charred clip of a photo he had found hidden between her bedroom drapes at Barnsdale, and for a moment she glimpsed the pre-War eyes of Robin before Geis let them slip onto the table and into the growing pool of blood from the girl's numbered flesh. "Or whether she was married to Flight Commander Thomas Carter, 2265483236Z, matters not at all to me now. The Lady Marion will never be seen again, the Nightwatch is dead - "

Marion turned her head around as far as she could (still being strapped into place), planning her further retort. But at Gisbonnhoffer's assertion the landser Ellingheim (far and away the more thuggish of Geis' men) entered the small room, dragging with him what it took her long moments to recognize (and then, primarily from his missing finger hands) was Joss Tyr. One of his eyes, previously so striking, was now opaque - occluded - its blindness (only that night come about) obvious.

"Calls himself the Whichman," Ellingheim reported to Gisbonnhoffer with a feral grin, as though they were both at enjoying themselves. "Quite proud of it. Couldn't wait to share that with us - even before we hooked him up to _die maschine_. Couldn't really get much else out of him once we did - didn't seem to have much effect on his mind, for all that it's broken him bodily."

It was true. The man once known as Count Werner von Himmel could not even stand on his own two feet. He looked of a rag doll, head lolling to the side, legs lacking in bones or other supportive structure.

Horrifyingly - as dreadful as were a corpse to part his lips and talk - Joss Tyr's mouth fell open and from his ravaged throat he began to speak. His face had the appearance of a porcelain Harlequin doll that had been smashed and inexpertly glued back together. His eerie stare was for none other present than Gisbonnhoffer himself.

"My prophecies for your superior are now ended," he announced, though he did not look as though he could summon breath enough to speak so, "fulfilled." If they still could, it was obvious his lips would have curled into a smile. "But I will not be so graceless as to let your..._hospitality_ go unrepaid." A single eyebrow still retained the strength to arch. "Listen well," he began with his usual mantra, "for I do not like to repeat myself." He was well winded, his voice that of sandpaper on plaster. "And indeed, shall be given very little chance to do so, here. The Nightwatch," he began, "the Nightwatch having risen, and risen again, will outlive your thousand-year Reich. She will outlive the Gisbonnhoffer name. And," the word was a brick dropped to the floor, "she will outlive you." The 'you' came out as might a death rattle. At the conclusion of his prophecy, Tyr had not even energy enough to close his mouth, giving him the look of an automaton whose wound gearworks have run down, stopped in mid-action.

The smallest flicker of a flame ignited the corner of a stray paper on the table toward which Marion was faced, but it could not sustain, fizzling and quickly transforming into little more than a thin column of ineffectual black smoke, less impressive than that spiraling off a lit cigarette.

In the wake of Tyr's statement, the room did not stay silent long. Geis turned away from the self-confessed Whichman, ignoring him, and toward Diefortner. "The girl is dead? Her filthy remains disposed of?"

"All as we discussed," the Underlieutenant agreed, looking somewhat askance at his own hands, stained bloody from the deed.

Gisbonnhoffer turned back to Ellingheim and gave the ruthless First Landser a smile that comprised only the gritting of his back molars, that deep corner of his lips parting to show his enjoyment of what was to come next. "Then there is only this Whichman to be dealt with."

The lieutenant's slope of eyebrow made it quite apparent that he expected Diefortner to handle Joss Tyr in a similar fashion to that of the girl.

"G'won, then," Gisbonnhoffer goaded him, wanting Marion to stand as witness to the act.

With a hand she saw to be more than slightly shaky, Marion watched as Diefortner raised his firearm (for the second time that night) and buried a bullet deep into the forehead of the clearly already-dying Joss Tyr. Tyr slumped further forward, hitting the floor when Ellingheim relinquished his grip upon him.

"Clever...Herr Geis," Diefortner took an unusual (and for him, still barely keeping himself from visibly trembling) moment to praise Gisbonnhoffer. "For now you may report the Nightwatch found - in the person of the _OberAdmiral_'s favorite - clearly placing the culpability into _Prinzer_'s hands, rather than in having to reveal Lady Marion as the true culprit...and the blame, instead, yours. Well done. The Kommandant will be most impressed."

Geis walked a step toward Diefortner to meet the other man where, assuming the night's work done, he was moving away from the table he had occupied. To do this, he had to sidestep one of Tyr's lifeless arms.

Marion watched on as Geis brought one of his own long arms around the back of the other man, giving it what appeared to be an approving, fraternal slap.

"Yes," Geis agreed, "most impressed."

"But," Diefortner began to speak, just as his body began to take on an unsteady sway, "but I have...killed for you - " He lurched forward, and Marion then saw the knife buried in the Underlieutenant's back, buried up to its hilt - the true purpose of Geis' uncharacteristically chummy back-slap.

"Thought you might say that," Geis told Diefortner as the other man's body collapsed in a spasm of coughing shortly stilled by his death.

Boots clattered to the doorway, and Landser Thered raced in. "We heard gunshots, Sir," he addressed Gisbonnhoffer, his commanding officer.

"Yes," answered Geis rather dryly, looking almost conspiratorially to Ellingheim. "The Nightwatch has killed Underlieutenant Diefortner."

Surveying the two dead bodies on the room's floor, Thered seemed to take all of this in stride. "He is an officer," the man reaffirmed. "Will not reprisals then be levied against Islanders?"

"Yes, man," Geis replied. "I should think so. Starting tomorrow, I do not doubt." There was a decided lack of human regret in his tone for the twenty-five islanders he had just condemned in pinning the murder of an officer on Tyr. Wanting to ensure that Marion understood what her actions had brought about (as well as his personal power in the matter), he continued to drive the point home. "I daresay, with the fact that Tyr, here, was a former Todt officer turned by these Islanders to Resistance, why, I should not be at all surprised if the Kommandant rather felt it more appropriate to levy fifty lives against these two." He caught the response of bloodthirsty Ellingheim's greedy eye, but resisted the urge to catch Marion's.

"Before you are dismissed, Thered," Geis ordered the other man, cocking his neck as though to crack it, "This prisoner," he waved his hand at her as the Kommandant might - as though she hardly occupied the same room, the same psychic space, "is scheduled for off-island transport. You may escort her - with the aid of Ellingheim - to the docks. She will ship tonight."

At this, he glanced floorward, and may have been looking only at the toe of his boot - at its polish job - for all that she could tell. He left the room without referencing her or speaking to her again.

* * *

**SARK - Dixcart Hotel -** Eleri Vaiser did not have to try hard to fake at being sick. On Alderney her father's car (driven by a soldier unknown to her) had been diverted from the task of bringing her straight to the docks, stopping instead inside the barbed wire portion of the Treeton Camp. She knew Treeton to be the camp proctored by Herr Geis, but she had never before been left unattended while at it.

The soldier-chauffeur had gone to try and search out _Underlieutenant_ Diefortner, whom her father expected to have a report from that evening. As the underlieutenant was proving slippery to find, he had set out on his own, well knowing how little anyone familiar with the Kommandant would wish to upset or disappoint him.

What caused her to get out of the car she could not immediately say. She was still outside the barracks area proper, but she let herself wander a bit (looking for a freshness of air so impossible to find in such a place) around a separate small hut of rooms. Not the offices, she knew. She had seen the offices, was familiar enough with them at this camp and several others laid out similarly.

In the evening's dark she could still see where barbed wire fencing created an area off-limits just behind (coming from each rear corner) this hut, making it impossible to walk a full circle around it. She walked over and up to where it forbade her from getting behind the hut, and felt the coming moment when one of the standard prison searchlights would scrape over this place.

Dependably the light trolled along the ground at a slow pace, looking for nothing specific, only doing its nightly duty. It came to the hut, crossed over her own back, throwing the area within the forbidding fencing into deep shadow.

Yet not deep enough for her to overlook what had in the darkness prior appeared nothing more than a pile of trash, a heap of unremarkable refuse.

It was neither. Sticking up at an awkward angle she saw the mangled hand - now absent its prosthetic - of what she could only recognize as Joss Tyr's. Her eyes tried to follow the incomplete appendage to verify his identity by seeing the rest of him to no avail. The body to which it was attached was twisted and bent from her view. Instead her gaze fell upon a brightly patterned headscarf she knew to be one that Marion had taken to wearing in the wake of her flight from Barnsdale and her new life at Thornton's. A frock she most particularly recognized as it was one that Allen Dale had stolen from among Marion's Barnsdale things to take to her the night of the windmill shooting. Eleri very vividly recalled having helped Marion into it as her wounding had impaired her ability to dress without assistance.

At these unexpected recognitions, her breath - the beat of her heart - escaped her.

Seconds where the light would continue to illuminate this corner were growing scant. Likely it was her own, unusual presence here that had caused it to linger as long as it had. Marion - what she could take for no one on earth but Lady Marion - underneath Tyr, her neck lying so that only half her face (though plenty of her hair) showed to allow her to be identified.

There was also a degree of blood, as she had been shot, which accounted for her desperately unsettling, enduring stillness. A chunk of skin was noticeably missing from the underside of her arm. Those arms Eleri thought once so graceful, so perfect in their knowing of how to hold themselves, how to comport themselves, to interact with others. Arms that knew their strength, the scope and possibility of their impressive reach.

In her distress, Eleri's palms tightened onto the pricks of the wire, her senses ignorant of the physical pain in doing so. The light passed, the inexactness of darkness re-accepted the two corpses, and she had not much longer to stand, horrified - stabbed through the heart - before her father's soldier-chauffeur found her, chivvied her back into the car and drove straightway for the docks, unaware of what she had seen, but in fear for his position if she were to mention he had left her for quite so long a time unchaperoned in such a place. (And without finding Diefortner, or his expected report, to return to the Kommandant.)

_This_, it came to her in a searing burst, those two bodies sickly entwined in gruesome death undismissable from her mind's-eye, _this__ is what it meant to love someone_, her heart told her, and her overrun brain and senses confirmed. _Perhaps not romantically. Not as a lover. But as a person._

It did not take much in the way of acting to begin to retch and show signs of feeling faint when they were reasonably away from Alderney and nearer Sark. She felt sick of the world, sick of the people from which she was sired. Sick for every captive soul on her father's cursed island. Green with tears that would not fall.

And sick with herself, that it had taken Lady Marion's death - her _murder_ - before she had begun to understand what the other woman had meant to her.

By the time she was brought into the Dixcart she was half-hysterical with it.

* * *

**Channel Waters, bound for France -** The air off the water raised gooseflesh upon what was exposed of Marion's skin, and in places where the prisoner's frock she wore was grown most thin (which was, actually, all over). It was a breeze which held none of the invigorating danger of having been out upon the water earlier that night. None of the same worry, the need to avoid carelessness. After all, the potential for escape was now nonexistent, portentless.

The shackles about her ankles, securing her to the boat - preventing her from jumping overboard - were an unnecessary reminder that within the space of short hours her entire station in life had completely altered. This morning she had been the Nightwatch, a wife, a mother-to-be. She had been Allen Dale's (if somewhat uneasily) one-time confidante - perhaps friend - someone he more-or-less trusted. The finder of one long-lost Mitch Bonchurch. This morning she had been Thomas Carter's soon-to-be savior.

_Thomas Carter_. Had he managed to do what she could not? Escape Gisbonnhoffer? Had their nothing-to-be-done-but-to-settle-for-it patch of a plan worked? Could he even now be in British-held air? Landed, even?

Thinking of flying, she thought of Amelia Earhart. It was '37 when she had disappeared. She thought of Earhart's on-board navigator, Noonan. He had disappeared - perished, little doubt of it - as well. One moment in the sky, the next - sunk, stranded - a ghost either way. Carter, also a pilot, had committed himself to the sky. She, Marion, had stayed earthbound - but they were no less partners in his escape. In this she so needed him to stay airborne. Needed to have him succeed - to have that triumph to hang her hat upon. If she could have that, perhaps she would accept crashing (so that he might not), accept colliding with the earth - could reconcile herself to having disappeared, to having become a ghost either way.

Perhaps this was the trade-off required. A life for a life. His to go on, hers to be...swallowed up.

Surely no one would know where she had gone, know what had become of her. Gisbonnhoffer had made it fairly clear he no longer would feel even the need to gloat over what he had brought about. The numbers on her arm stood in painful testament to the fact that any finding of her would be complicated by the fact that, per Jerry records, the Lady Marion Nighten was no longer locatable anywhere under their regime. And certainly _that_, that was to become the very quintessence of a ghost.

* * *

Her eyes again strayed over to where Le Moulin lit the Sarkese coast like an Irish bonfire - yet its flames far too high to jump for luck or otherwise. She knew it blazed for her, on account of her. Knew it was meant for her as surely as had Western-Union delivered a telegram and asked her to sign for it. Even, she could imagine the wildness of Robin's breath - his heart - when he had set it.

It told her everything. Everything that mattered: that he loved her. That he feared for her safety. That he would gladly risk his own safety - his own precious anonymity - for her. It was a very opposite send-off from the one she had received upon departing for America. He had had Mitch with him then, she recalled. Well - she could hope - he would have Mitch with him again, soon; reunited. And Mitch would do him a world of good. Allen, when found, would inform Robin there was no babe, Eva would, if asked, confirm it. For several moments her thoughts tumbled along, intent on reassuring herself the shock and surprise of her arrest and, for lack of a better word, kidnapping could (and would) easily be mitigated for Robin by those dependable few surrounding him.

But upon a calmer, more rational turning over of it, she knew it for prevarication, her mind trying to assure her of something she needed to believe. Spinning the equivalent of a faery story to avoid looking at the truth, hard as it was, of the matter.

She found herself thinking of the Nightwatch, of what records she had hoped Tyr might have played this night. Songs and news she now knew would never be broadcast, her - Mr. Thornton's - precious microphone silenced. No voice, no music. Among the songs she had selected for that night had been Fred Astaire, embarked upon a very different nighttime boat trip, this one on a Manhattan ferry. She had chosen it when she had expected to be joining Stoker on the sub. She had chosen it as her own message to Robin, whom she would have had to leave behind. She found that though the circumstances of her departure had dramatically altered, the sentiment she had wished to share with him had not. "_Our romance won't end on a sorrowful note/Though by tomorrow you're gone/The song has ended, but as the songwriter wrote/The melody lingers on_."

"_They may take you from me/I'll miss your fond caress/But though they take you from me/I'll still possess...the way you wear your hat/the way you sing off-key_."

It had not even been a full week after knowing Robin and the unit to be on the island (and amazingly alive) that she had found it necessary to remember something she had for so long wished to forget, that she had almost tricked herself into thinking she had forgotten. It had meant a trip to the Barnsdale attic and her trunks, there, among the dust that not even Clun's spit-spot staff could chase away for long. She had lit an oil lamp to take along in case the light proved too dim for her search. It had not been needed, though, her own dependable memory and the small windows that served to illuminate the space guiding her to what she sought.

There, within her smaller trunk - the one reserved for shorter trips (which, when she had come to check on Edward she had expected this would be), it had obediently lain inside its layers of tissue paper, beneath the glass of its frame. Why she had packed it (and she had done so without removing the tissue paper it had for some time worn where it had been relegated to being stored at the Mayfair house) she would not have liked to say.

It had been almost four years since it had been out of trunks and boxes, brought into the light of day. Four years since the frame's prop had been folded out, helping it to stand. She did not do so now without feeling something of pomp and ceremony. Something like five years thinking this portrait photograph was the last way in which she would ever see the man the London papers had designated Robert Oxley, Viscount Huntingdon, sole heir of his father, the Earl.

"_The way we danced 'til three._" Though the photograph was lovely, and well-done by a fashionable London studio, it was not the one that had run in the papers upon the notice of his death. That (and those of the other Six) was of the men in uniform, the Royal Army well aware of the at-the-time needed propaganda value of presenting young, handsome soldiers in uniform - dead soldiers. As she re-examined this picture of Robin, compared it to the man (now bearded) that she had so unexpectedly encountered the night of her engagement party and later at the Nightwatch windmill four days past, she heard a noise that told her she was not - as she had meant to be - alone.

"Marion!" There was a level of shock in her father's tone as he hissed through the half-darkness of the Guernsey afternoon. "Whatever are you doing up here? Why would you not have me bid Lewes search out whatever you had need of? Or ask Eva to do for you?"

His questions were entirely valid ones, she knew. But unlike the mind-muddled Sir Edward, she also knew her father's once-faithful valet Lewes had gone for a soldier shortly after the war began, and that Eva Heindl had ceased working as her ladies maid with the arrival of the Germans.

She waited a moment and held in a hasty (and possibly impatient) answer. Edward cast his eyes about the space. "I have forgotten," he confessed, "what was it we were looking for?"

This time, before she could formulate an answer - and one to throw him off her true intent, he spied the picture frame in her hands, recognized its subject. "Oh, Darling," he said, his voice awash in the softness of sympathy, "oh, Marion. You must - not that," his eyes were immediately shot through with hurt, "not still. You must let it go, Child. You must - you must...he is gone." He tried to infuse his voice with hope and vigor. "But life is not over for you. Life is - Life can still be - " His hand, slightly shaking as it would now more often than not, came up to her shoulder where she was seated, and sought to bring her comfort.

Despite now knowing Robin to be very much alive (having now distractingly, confusingly known it for the past four days), she could not help but be moved by her father's emotional appeal to her, his investment in Robin's death and loss on her behalf, and so it was with tear-filled eyes she returned his gaze.

"Yes," Edward agreed with himself, some of his distress falling away, "I must have your mother take down a letter to Huntingdon for me. It has been far too long since we heard from him. Far too long."

Marion let the tears in her eyes resolve back into their ducts. Were she to cry now it would be for the chronic confusion of time and place her father wandered about in, rather than the loss of life she now knew Robin had not suffered. "Recall, though, Father," she reminded Edward, "Sir Robert never seems to keep up with his post when he has gone to the country. That is all that is behind his absence, I am certain. He has left London for Kirk Leaves."

In agreement, her father began to mutter to himself.

"Go, now," she encouraged him, "it is nearly tea time. I will be down directly."

"Yes," he agreed, now absently. "Yes." Something in the wrinkles of his face for a moment hardened. "It is never easily done, Marion," he told her, "losing someone you love. Losing that...world you had made, inhabited together."

His statement, so unexpected, so thick with personal investment took her breath away, and even his back had disappeared back down the servants' stair before she had regained enough presence of mind to speak.

She turned her attention back to Robin's photograph, knowing what she had to do. She removed the glass globe from the oil lamp, walked over and found an old, empty metal ash can. Holding the photo - no longer in the frame - she placed its edge in the lamp's flame, and it easily ignited to the point it shortly had to be dropped down into the can to protect against the scalding her fingertips.

Determined to see her task through to the end, she stood over the ash can and watched it burn. Watched to make sure no trace of it was left.

"_The way you changed my life_."

The world they had inhabited together. She found she could not fully repudiate, eliminate that - wipe it from existence. She looked down into the old ash can, the flames she had lit both consumed the photographic paper and illuminated its subject. Little more than the eyes were now left. _His eyes_. His jolly, merry prankster's eyes. 'There is a secret in this photograph,' he had told her when he had gifted it, and she had half expected him to confess to some disappearing ink visible only when passed over candlelight. 'When you look in my eyes you will know,' he had confessed, 'as the man took the picture, I was sure to be thinking only of you.'

It was a ridiculous thing to do - to reach into an ash can to retrieve a paper already on fire, to salvage a pair of eyes that might never again look so when thinking of her. Those eyes from that world they had made, that they had inhabited together. How different now, on this island so far smaller than Britain. This life circumscribed by oppressors. It was a new world now, the eyes in this photograph - in the living flesh - dangerous even to think about. The spheres which he, Robin, and she, Marion, inhabited (as she had tried to impress upon him that night they danced at the Nightwatch) necessarily non-tangential.

_Yes. _

_Losing someone you love. Never easily done_.

* * *

Oddly - unexpectedly - the further the boat got from Channel shores, the closer to a French port, the more hopeful she became. It was a queer feeling to have, but there it was. The game - her life - had changed. She was to be free of Geis, liberated from that place drenched in his power and influence. Whatever came next was to be entirely other. More than a challenge, to be certain - but one that would bear no similarity to her past. The longstanding, stifling air of Occupation and the shadow-life she had had to maintain to protect herself and the Nightwatch was gone - blown away as by a strong weather-changing wind. Whatever cares Magda Blenheim had carried with her, whatever family connections or personal history, she had taken to her death.

In this Marion saw a blank slate before her, an unsettling freedom in both knowing herself a prisoner and also knowing herself to have no further need to hide. Her enemies could only kill her once, after all. They had stripped her now of everything external that meant anything to her, they had scarred her flesh with the identity they sought to impose upon her. But in the coming absence of everything familiar, everything about which she had understood and with which she had grappled, she found something of strength. The blank that Magda Blenheim was to her would _become_ her.

She felt born.

Looking down at her arm, and the numbers there, even in the dark she noticed the tattoo still seeped. Knowing where she was headed, what she would face in such a camp; little food, unhygienic conditions, further privation, she dropped her arm over the boat's edge, down into the salt sea.

The sting of the burning her action brought on felt clean. It felt real and honest, and she found she had no tears to add to the sea's salt.

In the distance, Le Moulin burned - sure to be little more than ash and memories by dawn.

What was yet left of the Lady Marion Oxley, Vicountess Huntingdon, looked on, knowing the originator, the source of that desperate blaze to be her only true regret. Knowing that no one - German or other - could ever take that away from her.

* * *

- {{

* * *

_EPILOGUE_

**Rural SCOTLAND -** Louise La Salle had been called to the door by the farmer's wife to meet with a man she had never seen before in her life.

The look on the farmer's wife's face let her know quickly enough that she did not believe Louise unacquainted with the strapping sample of manhood on her doorstep, but she said nothing, and left the two of them alone quickly enough.

It was not that Ron Legg was out-of-place here in the North, certainly no more than he would be anywhere else, and in fact, here, far less so. It was his own nagging reservations about what he was about to do that left him feeling unbalanced and uncomfortable, not the undersized chairs nor the low ceilings in the simple cottage where he had found the refugee Roger Stoker had set him on the path of.

"Forgive me," Madame La Salle had asked him, a decidedly French lilt to her accent, no matter she was far from both that country and her island home. "I'm not sure I understand why you are here. You say you have a letter for me, and yet - no letter?"

"Right, yes, Ma'am," he agreed with her. "Mine is a strange errand. The letter in question remains in the possession of those overseeing the War Rooms, etcetera, in London. They would not allow me to bring it to you, and possibly would disapprove were they to know I was here, but in the time that it was in my possession, rest assured I had plenty of time to memorize and meditate upon it. It is from a man named Stephen, from best I could tell from the sloppily-rendered signature, on the Channel Island of Sark."

Her breath caught. "He is my husband. I have heard nothing from him in five years." Tears threatened to glut her throat as she tried to explain his penmanship. "He is blind."

"Aye, Ma'am?" At that, Legg gave a belly-rattling laugh. "Well, it explains things well enough," he agreed. "My apologies."

When the echoes of his hearty hoot had died away, he recited, "_God bring this to you, God find you well. I remain, 'Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed...(for we walk by faith, not by sight)._' Then there is a new paragraph: _You fade not from my memory, nor from my future hopes._ After that, the closure."

She knew she probably appeared shaken in the wake of the recited letter, but asked anyway, "and why should men in the War Rooms have any interest in this? A man writing to encourage his wife?"

"Ooo," he risked saying, "they've got dozens upon dozens down there convinced it's a code of some kind, working 'round the clock to decipher it. Others trying to place the references to Holy Scripture in the context of a numerical cryptogram or some such rot. Here, I've written it down for ye," he offered her a folded paper, "though it be not in his hand."

"Nor never was it," she informed him. "Other than his own name he has been able to handwrite little these many years past. It would have had to be scriven for him. Nonetheless, I pray God's particular blessing on those fingers for the favor of putting it to paper for him, and for yourself, Mr. Legg, in bringing it here. You have brought me great happiness during a time in which such can be ever harder to find. How beautiful are your feet, _Monsieur_ - as are the feet of all those who bring good news!"

Legg looked into her face as she smiled across the parlor at him. She was a small little thing, dark-haired, bird-like. He did not doubt her very bones were hollow, airy. "There is one more for to add to your prayers," he told her. "The man who first carried the letter to me. He lost his life in the doing of it."

Before she could reply, Little Stephen had entered the room, bringing his jolly disposition with him.

"You've a boy, I see," Legg smiled at the little lad. "I've a lad meself. On my way to visit with him just now before hurrying south again.

"If you will leave your card," she urged him, "I should like to knit you something, perhaps send some jam down to London for you. A smallish thanks for what kindness you have done us."

"Not small at all ma'am," he gladly assured her, "and I should very much value it. But it seems best we keep our names separate at the moment - my superiors likely not to be pleased were they to learn I was here, and why. Let me give you my Mark's address at Kirk Leaves. Send the things you might have sent to me, to him. I am often away, and he will cherish whatever might come in the post."

And so it was settled.

* * *

**ENGLAND - London, HQ British Secret Intelligence Service -** No one could ever accuse the robust Clem Nighten of behaving in a poky manner - of keeping a slowcoach pace - but even so, his speed this day, this hour, far eclipsed the pace he usually set when navigating the various and seemingly endless subterranean corridors of MI-6.

At present he ran to chase after a man half a rumor, half a myth, and at least half of whom must be factually verifiable: a downed RAF pilot of Eagle Squadron, first held captive and then living hidden among the Channel Islands for the better part of a twelve-month.

It was not Clem's first attempt to break into the man's seemingly-endless briefings, ever on different levels, in different departments, always held at different times here within SIS. The classified, eyes-only papers he clutched to his chest within manila folders had several pages, much of which, even then, was blacked out, about a Jerry plot directly planned to kill the King, Jerry codename '_Sher Wut_'. A plot (and its vital details) first brought to light by this man.

For Clem, the plot to kill the King, and the details of it, could jolly well wait. As far-fetched as the possibility might be, something in his gut told him this man knew something of Marion. May have even met her.

'Pipedreams' one of his school chums (now upper-level brass) had told him, before agreeing (for the sake of old times) to sign off on permission for Clem to attend the man's next debrief.

Nighten cared neither for the dismissive term, nor for the man's opinion (top brass or not) - he had been a booby when they were at school, and time, it would appear, had altered very little of him in the interim.

Reaching the designated room, he swung wide the thick, metal door which held no window through which those in the hall could view its contents.

A Yank (clear enough by the sound of his voice) sat across a standard issue metal table from several other men. Despite all appearances, it was not a hostile interrogation. Various tape machines and recording devices littered the space. Two girls from the stenography pool took rapid notes. The Yank looked up and away from the others upon his entrance, distracted, no doubt, by the opening of the door.

He gave Clem a piercing look. It lingered just long enough that Nighten knew. It was the look he would encounter among people who knew Marion, but whom he had never met. The silent acknowledgement that yes, there was a resemblance there, a certain similarity. A look of recognition.

It was then that he knew that his efforts to speak to this man, to learn what he could about his sister and father, had not been - would not be - in vain.

* * *

...**to be concluded** in Story 4 of the '_Don't_' series, "_'Til I Come Marchin' Home_"...

* * *

Our Cast  
_Robert "Robin" Oxley, Viscount Huntingdon_...Robin of Locksley, Earl of Huntingdon, aka the outlaw Robin Hood  
_The Lady Marion Nighten_...Lady Marian of Knighton  
_Lieutenant, Herr Geis Gisbonnhoffer_...Sir Guy of Gisborne  
_Island Kommandant Heinrik Vaiser_...Vaisey, Sheriff of Nottingham  
_Sir Edward, Lord Nighten, former Parliamentarian_...Sir Edward of Knighton, former Sheriff of Nottingham

_The rest of the "Saintly Six" -  
Mitch Bonchurch (born Mitch Miller), Navigation Officer_...Much  
_William "Wills" Reddy, Communications Officer_...Will Scarlet  
_Allen Dale, Reconnaissance and Acquisitions, alias Dale Allen, the Kommandant's driver_...Allan-A-Dale  
_Richard Royston, Explosives_...Royston "Roy" White  
_Iain "John" Johnson, Medic_...Little John Little

_Flight Commander Thomas Carter, aka Alexsei "Aliosha" Igorovich, Prince Komonoff_...Carter, a knight Templar serving in the King's private guard from S2 "Get Carter!" and S2 "We Are Robin Hood". (His dead brother's name was Thomas).  
_Underlieutenant Diefortner_...De Fourtnoy of S1 "Who Shot the Sheriff?" who _briefly_ served as the Sheriff's Master-At-Arms  
_Gypsy Boy Djak/Seraina_...D'Jaq/Saffiya, Saracen slave/captive who joined Robin Hood's gang in S1 "Turk Flu"  
_Anya Grigorovna_...Annie, kitchen wench and (Heaven help her) mother of Gisborne's son, Seth, of S1 "Parent Hood"  
_Dick Giddons_...Benedict Giddons, the Locksley flour thief who broke under torture and named Will and Luke Scarlet as his co-conspirators in S1 "Will You Tolerate This?"  
_Stephen "Blind" La Salle_...Stephen, the widowed blind architect and (seemingly hermit) teacher of S2 "Booby and the Beast". Meant to stand as a re-rendering of both that BBC series character and the Hood legend's Friar Tuck (not the series' Tuck).  
_Eva Heindl_...Eve of Bonchurch, of S1 "A Thing or Two About Loyalty"  
_Tom Thatcher_...Tom-A-Dale, on-the-make brother of Allan-A-Dale, hanged erroneously for Robin Hood's man in S1 "Brothers in Arms"  
_(Current U.S. 5th Army Lieutenant Colonel) Fred Otto_...the Booby; Count Friedrich Bertrand Otto von Wittelsbach, of the German duchy of Bavaria, of S2 "Booby and the Beast"  
_Lord Merton_...Walter, Lord of Merton, noble conspirator and supporter of King Richard during Edward's plan to overthrow the Sheriff in S1 "A Clue: No", prior to that, a regular attendee of the Council of Nobles  
_Clem Nighten_...Sir Clem of Knighton, an OC, Marian's older brother, as invented for my S2 finale (and going forward) band-aid fanfic, "Death Would Be Simpler to Deal With"  
_Jodderick, Bailiff of Guernsey_...Joderic, bailiff of Nottingham in S1 "Who Shot the Sheriff?" [yes, Guernsey's highest civilian official even, to this day, wears the title, 'bailiff']  
_Roger Stoker, Intelligence officer previously assigned to the British 8th Army_...Roger of Stoke, knight loyal to King Richard, sent with an important letter by Robin, doomed at the word of Allan-A-Dale in S2 "The Angel of Death"  
_OberAdmiral Jan Prinzer, highest ranking officer of the German Occupation force trying to overthrow King George's (Britain & the Crown's) control of the Channel Islands_...Prince John, high-ranking member of the monarchy trying to overthrow King Richard's control of England, throughout the series  
_Mr. Thornton_...Thornton of Locksley, faithful servant and (presumed) life-long friend of Robin Hood first introduced in S1 "Will You Tolerate This?"  
_Matthew, attache to the Bailiff_...Matthew of Nettlestone, casualty of S1 "Who Shot the Sheriff?"  
_Mrs. Abby Rufford_...Abbess of Rufford, fake member of the clergy working to thwart the Sheriff and rob Nottingham (and England) of its taxes in S1 "The Tax Man Cometh".  
_Laurence McLellan_...Laurence McLellan, one-legged, doomed courier of a letter from the King, and the Sultan's best pigeon, Lardner, in S2 "Lardner's Ring". A man trying to deliver his message to the right house, but intercepted by the wrong person being at home there. It is over his dead body Robin so memorably proposes.  
_Louise La Salle_...Alice Little, first seen in S1 "Sheriff Got Your Tongue?", who loves fish and takes in sewing, and has a son who does not know his father, about whom his father does not know.  
_Joss Tyr/Operation Todt Officer Count Werner von Himmel_...The Fool of S2 "Lardner's Ring", fond of soothsaying and (at least when it is in his best interest) outlaws.  
_Elerinne Vaiser_...Eleri of the necklace, who wishes to be married, and asks 'Lord' Gisborne first, before coming to her senses and having Robin perform the ceremony in S1 "Brothers In Arms".  
_Specialist Joseph_...Joseph of S2 "The Angel of Death", with a knack for hurting people (and a desire to eliminate 'undesirables' from the world, starting with Nottingham).  
_ReichKaptain Lamburg_...Lambert, of the black powder ledger, a man who discovers too late where his loyalties lie (and where his supposed friend's, Gisborne's, lie as well) in S1 "A Thing or Two About Loyalty".  
_Hilda Heindl_...Matilda the midwife of S2 "Ducking and Diving"  
_Daniel Heindl_...Daniel, hostage outlaw wannabe in the Sheriff's black diamond exchange of S2 "Child Hood".  
_Ginny Glasson_...Lady Glasson, to whose relative safety Annie and Seth were sent at the end of S1 "Parent Hood".  
_Naval Commander Ron Legg_...LeGrande [invert the name, 'Legg, Ron'] knight loyal to King Richard, dying in His service, a member of the King's Private Guard, who knows Robin and Much in S2 "Treasure of the Nation".  
_Mark Legg_...Mark, blonde outlaw wannabe of S2 "Child Hood".  
_Lucky George_...Lucky George, buyer of your peasant valuables and treasures so you can pay your taxes in S1 "Brothers In Arms".  
_Operation Todt Oberseer Jarl Derheim_...The Earl of Durham, unseen buyer of brides from the Church in S1 "Show Me the Money".  
_Landser Thered_...Michael the Red, Gisborne's champion in S1 "Turk Flu" archery contest for the Sheriff's silver arrow.  
_Island Constable Dunne of Guernsey_...Treeton miner, Rowan's father in S1 "Turk Flu".  
_Island Constable Paxton of Sark_...Paxton, a wool merchant, the gang's contact (revealed to have been turned by the Sheriff) in S2 "Treasure of the Nation".  
_Island Constable Rowan (of Guernsey)_...Rowan, son of Dunne, out for revenge on Gisborne (mistakenly via Marian) for his father's death in S1 "Turk Flu".  
_Seth Heindl_...the baby Seth, of S1 "Parent Hood", a child abandoned by his father.  
_First Landser Ellingheim_...Ellingham, captain of the Sheriff's mercenaries in S2 "A Good Day to Die".  
_Auschwitz/Treeton Camp Prisoner Magda Blenheim_...Serving Girl (she is not given a name in the credits), in S2 "Angel of Death". She agrees to trade clothes with Marian so that Marian may flee the castle to see the quarantine and alleged outbreak in Nottingham Town (said to be the Nightwatchman's doing) for herself.

Our Locations  
_The Channel Island of Guernsey, and in particular the Barnsdale estate_...Knighton, Village and Hall (named so after Barnsdale Forest)  
_The Channel Island of Sark_...Sherwood Forest  
_The Channel Island of Alderney_...Nottingham  
_Kirk Leaves, the Earl of Huntingdon's English country home_...Locksley Village & Manor (named so for the series' oft-acknowledged safety of Kirklees Abbey)  
_Treeton Camp, Channel Island of Alderney_...Treeton Village and Mines, where D'Jaq was brought as slave labor in S1 "Turk Flu"  
_The Bertrand-Otto Stables and Farm of Nicholasville, Kentucky, USA_...the German Duchy of Bavaria (named so for the Booby, 'Count Friedrich Bertrand Otto...'), but also meant (along with America) to stand in for the Holy Land/the Crusades, as this is where Marion goes to find glory (on the American Equestrian Circuit) and to prove herself (as series Robin - and yes, even Robin here - went for a soldier/knight)  
_Farm of Blind La Salle, Channel Island of Sark_...Outlaws' Camp  
_Ripley Convent School_...Ripley Convent, home of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in S2 "Get Carter!", where Marian tries (with Allan's helpful attacking of its Mother Superior) to convince Guy she is staying in the wake of Edward's death.  
_Lincoln Greene, the Nighten family English country estate_...Lincoln Green, in the legends, usually the specific color dye and weave of the concealing green cloth worn by Sherwood outlaws. (Marion's London-based horse here is 'Greene's Sword', as in, coming from Lincoln Greene - but its name also hearkening back to a name used in legends for the forest; greensward.)  
_Grey Goose Gentlemen's Club of London, the Earl of Huntingdon's club_...no, not _THAT_ kind of club, named for the legend Robin Hood's usual 'grey goose shaft' - his arrows fletched with goose feathers.  
_The Tripp Club of London, Robin Oxley's club_...for The Trip to Jerusalem Inn, referenced as merely 'the Trip' in all seasons, an actual place in actual Nottingham, now called, 'Ye Olde' Trip to Jerusalem Inn. Named after its claim to being the last stop for Crusaders before leaving town for Richard's holy war. [_Have *you* been there? Betcha Glorious Clio has_...]  
_The Argent Arrow_...the silver arrow of Hood myth and legend, which here, Robin (and the Tripp Club) lose, in the form of the victor's cup at an annual cricket tournament.  
_Heather's-Edge Heath_...Hathersage Heath from S2, "Treasure of the Nation", a collection of standing stones. The Channel Islands are known to have several collections of standing stones; ten cromlechs with two dolmens still surviving.

_Other series place names_ have been substituted for inconsequential characters here and there, for example, the butlers Mr. Clun (Barnsdale) and Wadlowe (Kirk Leaves), Mrs. Trent of the NYC British Consulate (never seen, only referenced), Dr. Battley, the only physician on Sark (Battley Street in Nottingham being where the duplicitous Dr. Pitts is said by Thornton to now live in S1 "The Return of the King"), Sir Edward's former valet Lewes (Henry of Lewes from S2's "Ducking and Diving"), and Roger Stoker's mother-in-law Baroness Woodvale (a member of the Council of Nobles).  
_Other series words_ also appear in various forms...the word _Nottingham_ becomes the Nord Ingham Boarding Stables (though Alderney remains a story stand-in for the actual place), The Fool of S2 "Lardner's Ring" becomes 'Joss Tyr'/(Jester), Marion proves preternaturally adept with a horse (as does series Robin with the bow), 'Saracen's Beau'/A (re-curved) Saracen Bow. The horse's sire and dam are 'Swallow Den'/(Saladin) and 'Cordelia Anne'/(Coeur-de-Lion).  
Therefore, as series Robin gets his 'bow' (the superior expression of his particular talent) from the Crusades, so does this Marion get her 'Beau' from the same two 'adversaries', if you will.  
Here, Gisbonnhoffer/Gisborne gives up his family, as he does his illegitimate son by Annie (S1 _Parent Hood_), Seth, in the series.  
Here, Seth is 'given up' (though he is no longer Geis'/Guy's and Anya/Annie's child) by a father who does not know of his existence.  
To say that the series' Sheriff of Nottingham's cabal of 'Black Knights' are represented here by the Nazis on Alderney, in their black uniforms, who are in particular S.S. is, frankly, too facile to be believed, but there you have it.

Any character not mentioned specifically here in the cast list is fully OC.

A word about _Operation Pellinore_...of course this was not an historically 'real' British Commando raid of the Islands (the others mentioned all did occur, and in fact, even more were planned - but abandoned, including a large one meant to wrest the islands out of German control entirely). Nineteen-forty-three was a busy year for British Commandos on the islands. Operation Huckabuck occurred February 27-28th of that year, with Hardtack 7 putting in at Sark's Pt. Terrible in December.  
Pellinore is an Arthurian knight (his story varies slightly by which legend you might choose to privilege), but more importantly (in the storyline I prefer) he is a king who has misplaced his kingdom; lost it and can no longer find his way back to it. As Robin has lost (through his faked death) his to-be-inherited earldom, and is stranded, unable to return to England (his kingdom) along with the rest of Unit 1192, _and_ as King George and the British Empire have lost the Channel Islands (their kingdom) to the Germans.  
[*This 'Pellinore' has no relation to _Lord of the Rings_' Battle of Pelennor Fields (as that novel had not been published at the time)].

*Please see the author's ending note on Story 1, "_Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree_", regarding historical and geographical content, and the use of any unintentional anachronisms in this fictional work.

**Please note, _Le Moulin_, the (actual, real world) ancient windmill occupying the highest point on Sark (and indeed on all of Guernsey's multi-island bailiwick) had had its sails removed long before the German Occupation, and, perhaps more significantly, was historically never set ablaze, as Robin lights it so here in his despair.


End file.
